The Symantec Threat Hunter Team at Broadcom Software recently discovered a new ransomware family called Yanluowang.
Although there are signs that it has been poorly coded due to a lack of sophisticated features, researchers believe it is relatively new and under development, and that it is also dangerous.
In its report on Ransomware, Symantec found, “This tool is often abused by ransomware attackers as a reconnaissance tool, as well as to equip the attackers with the resources that they need for lateral movement via Active Directory. Just days after the suspicious AdFind activity was observed on the victim organization, the attackers attempted to deploy the Yanluowang ransomware.”
Before using the ransomware itself, Yanluowang leaves behind a few signs behind on a compromised computer including the creation of a .txt file with the number of remote computers in the network which is run against Windows management instrumentation to obtain a list of the processes that are run on these machines and are logged in return to the .txt file for a later retrieval.
Once installed, the Ransomware stops all hypervisor VMS that run on a compromised computer, terminates the processes listed in the .txt file, encrypts files, and deposits a readme with a ransom note on the infected computer.