After the successful attacks made by the Darkside Ransomware on the Colonial Pipe and the REvil Sodinokibi Ransomware on Kaseya, both ended their operations. This opened a gap for new ransomware extensions to appear in order to protagonists in the new attacks and in the so-called Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) which is the outsourcing of attacks.
From this gap, some ransomware families emerged and entered the “dispute” such as BlackMatter Ransomware, Lockbit 2.0 Ransomware, among others.
We have a lot to talk about these new ransomware families that are aiming to carry on the legacy of successful attacks left by Darkside and REvil Sodinokibi Ransomware.
Let’s take a closer look at BlackMatter Ransomware.
At the end of July, BlackMatter appeared on a Russian forum claiming to be a ransomware that contains the best parts of Darkside and REvil Sodinokibi Ransomware, unlike its predecessors, it doesn’t have any restricted countries for attacks, like Russia, for example, and also does not encrypt all the files on the computer, but only a part, this is done so that the encryption time is reduced and the countermeasures do not have enough time to be activated.
The only restrictions for targets are:
- Hospitals.
- Critical infrastructure facilities (nuclear power plants, power plants, water treatment facilities).
- Oil and gas industry (pipelines, oil refineries).
- Defence industry.
- Not-for-profit companies.
- Government sector.
These restrictions were posted by the BlackMatter developers themselves. These restrictions were made so that the same mistakes made by Darkside and REvil Sodinokibi do not happen again, mistakes that led to the termination of their services. These areas draw a lot of attention from government officials, particularly the US government. If your company is not part of these sectors, you are a target for them.
Given all this “power” of BlackMatter, you may be wondering what countermeasures can be taken to avoid paying the ransom.
BlackMatter ransomware encrypted file recovery
Digital Recovery has developed a unique technology capable of decrypting ransomware, of any length, we call it Tracer.
This recovery process can be done even without the decryption key, because we access the hard disk where the files were stored and we are able to reconstruct them.
This type of recovery was impossible until two years ago, so there are still companies that say that recovering files attacked by ransomware is impossible.
We did not accept this fact and invested heavily in the development of a suitable technology for this, and after a lot of investments and efforts, we were finally able to create this technology. This has saved our customers highly significant value for their companies.
All our services follow the guidelines established by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), so that the recovery of encrypted data is done safely and discreetly. In addition to following these guidelines, we also have an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement).
