Background

Since its arrival in April 2019, it has become very clear that the new kid in town, “Sodinokibi” or “REvil” is a serious threat. The name Sodinokibi was discovered in the hash ccfde149220e87e97198c23fb8115d5a where ‘Sodinokibi.exe’ was mentioned as the internal file name; it is also known by the name of REvil.

At first, Sodinokibi ransomware was observed propagating itself by exploiting a vulnerability in Oracle’s WebLogic server. However, similar to some other ransomware families, Sodinokibi is what we call a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), where a group of people maintain the code and another group, known as affiliates, spread the ransomware.

This model allows affiliates to distribute the ransomware any way they like. Some affiliates prefer mass-spread attacks using phishing-campaigns and exploit-kits, where other affiliates adopt a more targeted approach by brute-forcing RDP access and uploading tools and scripts to gain more rights and execute the ransomware in the internal network of a victim. We have investigated several campaigns spreading Sodinokibi, most of which had different modus operandi but we did notice many started with a breach of an RDP server.

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