A data wiper posing as ransomware bears a discomfiting resemblance to the earlier wave of Russian cyberattacks that ended with NotPetya.
. But Microsoft also warned that the number of victims may still grow as the wiper malware is discovered on more networks.
Viktor Zhora, a senior official at Ukraine's cybersecurity agency known as the State Services for Special Communication and Information Protection, or SSSCIP, says that he first began hearing about the ransomware messages on Friday. Administrators found PCs locked and displaying a message demanding $10,000 in Bitcoin, but the machines' hard drives were irreversibly corrupted when an admin rebooted them.
"We're trying to see if this is linked to a larger attack," says Zhora. "This could be a first phase, part of more serious things that could happen in the near future. That’s why we’re very worried." Microsoft warns that when a PC infected with the fake ransomware is rebooted, the malware overwrites the computer's master boot record or MBR, information on the hard drive that tells a computer how to load its operating system. Then it runs a file corruption program that overwrites a long list of file types in certain directories. Those destructive techniques are unusual for ransomware, Microsoft's blog post notes, given that they're not easily reversible if a victim pays a ransom.
Both of the malware's destructive techniques, as well as its fake ransomware message, carry eerie reminders of
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