Decrypting encrypted files from Akira ransomware using a bunch of GPUs
tinyhack.com
tinyhack.com
You are incorrect. What is limited is the number of attacks that can be used for victims to recover their files. If you think the author is the only person that was using this attack to recover files, you are incorrect again. I’d recommend checking out book The Ransomware Hunting Team. It’s interesting book about what happens behind the scene for helping victims recover their files.
Moreover, "This is a game of cat and mouse" suggests that it's not valuable for more victims to have their files decrypted, which is somewhere between malicious and insane.
The immediate parent comment says that if the vulnerability is publicly declared, attackers can easily patch it.
Paraphrasing my response: not publicly declaring the vulnerability is security by obscurity.. which does not work.
Don't attack a strawman.
I just hope that publishing the ransomware vulnerability was not ego-driven or anything like that, because they burned a period of time in which they could have helped many people.
The nazi communications were decrypted by a highly centralized and secrative group, making it very difficult for the Nazis to figure out how they were doing it.
But in this case any vulnerability in the ransomware will have to be exploited by many of the affected people to decrypt their files, which means wide distribution, which means that a leak to the ransomware developers will happen sooner than later. If there is no wide distribution of the vulnerability, the ransomware developers win anyway.
It absolutely does. Your claim is "security through obscurity applies when attacking a cryptosystem, so after you figure out how to break it, you should publish the details". By your logic, the Allies absolutely should have published the details of how they broke the Enigma.
> But in this case any vulnerability in the ransomware will have to be exploited by many of the affected people to decrypt their files, which means wide distribution
Yet again, you show your overwhelming ignorance of the field and basic logic. No, the decryption/exploit does not have to be widely distributed. It's extremely easy to realize that the good guys can just keep it tightly-held and provide a service where files are sent to them for decryption.
You should avoid spreading incorrect and harmful anti-information like this.
They absolutely did. hassleblad23 has absolutely no idea what they're talking about and no experience in the field. It was obviously the wrong move to publish the Akira weakness.
I'm not. You're just factually wrong.
> not publicly declaring the vulnerability is security by obscurity.. which does not work.
Now I know that you don't know what you're talking about. Anyone either passingly familiar with the field of information security, or capable of using basic logic, knows that this is incorrect in multiple ways.
First, because security by obscurity can increase the security of a system when you combine it with other measures.
Second, because you're using "security by obscurity" as a religious word without the slightest understanding of what it actually means, which is that, when designing a secure system (that is, when playing the role of the defender), relying on security by obscurity alone is bad.
This is not what is happening in the article. In the article, yohanes/TinyHack is playing the role of the attacker - the Akira ransomware has a cryptosystem and they are attacking it. "Security by obscurity" is entirely irrelevant here.
It's extremely obvious to either someone who thinks for a few seconds, or anyone with a basic understanding of the field, that the attackers primarily rely on security through obscurity, and that publicly revealing the vulnerabilities in the defenders' systems that you've discovered is almost always an extremely bad idea.
And that includes this case. Now that yohanes has disclosed the vulnerability in Akira, the authors can immediately patch it, and the upside is virtually non-existent: an educational lesson for someone new to the field, which could have easily been provided in a way that doesn't inhibit our ability to decrypt victims' files. If yohanes had instead kept the vulnerability a secret, they could have disseminated it to a limited number of other cybersecurity experts, and offered to decrypt files as a service, helping victims without revealing the vulnerability in the crypto.
You shouldn't comment if you don't have the slightest idea of what the words you're using actually mean.
This feels like a net win.
Dont get me wrong,im glad they don't, its just kind of surprising as it seems like such a rookie mistake. Is there something i'm missing here or is it more a caseof people who know what they are doing don't chose a life of crime?
I assume that threat detection maintains a big fingerprint databases of tools associated with malware. Rolling your own tooling, rather than importing a known library, gives one less heuristic to trip detection.
If it were me, I'd combine urandom (or equivalent), high-res timestamps, and clock jitter (sample the LSB of a fast clock at "fixed" intervals where the interval is a few orders of magnitude slower than the clock resolution), and hash them all together.
Huge props to the author for coming up with this whole process and providing such fascinating details
Ransomeware wouldn't be a problem at all if copy-on-write snapshotting filesystems were the default.
Developers with 1 project open have potentially hundreds to thousands of open, quite valuable files.
Now of course, we generally expect developers to have backups via VCS but that's exactly the point: snapshotting filesystems with append semantics for common use cases is an actual, practical defense.
It should be pretty simple to [say] make a hardware solution to allow only writing out new files.
I also find it comical that my production database has instructions to conveniently delete or modify all rows in my table. That would be at the top of the list of features I don't want.
I have backups of course, backups on writable usb drives.
Like, when I lose everything it is really nice to be able to delete files from my backup drive. This is such a great idea.
Excuse my ignorance but is one really updating hundreds of files the day round? On some factory machines that do dangerous things you have to hold down two buttons.
Something else, how many times, because of a bad mousepad, whole directorys got moved somewhere. Often you don't even know what you moved, so you can't even search. Special in my last company, we had for sure once a month such a "new" in our data.
I did that drag and drop trick too. I don't even know what I did but a lot of system files and folders ended up on the desktop.
It isn't hard to imagine how features like this came to be and why the product was considered finished. We can obviously do better.
>Developers with 1 project open have potentially hundreds to thousands of open, quite valuable files.
And malware wouldn't be able to access any of those files without the developer explicitly giving it access.
Append only semantics doesn't scale for consumer devices as they do not have the luxury of extra storage space.
If the user runs "reformat project" once, then gets a new version, are try going to have any warning that "reformat project" is about to encrypt every file it touches?
>Does clicking a file count?
Yes, clicking a file from the file picker counts.
>Asking for code reformatting across the project?
You can grant access to a directory in that case.
>How long does access last? How is it revoked?
It can last forever or until the application is closed. There is room to choose how exactly it could work.
>If the user runs "reformat project" once, then gets a new version, are try going to have any warning that "reformat project" is about to encrypt every file it touches?
That would be up to the design.
Then changes made to files should be stored as deltas to the original.
But realistically a good readonly/write new backup solution is needed, you never know when something bad might happen.
I think most people don’t care about their system directories but their data?
Backups and onedrive for enterprises, yes. :)
The idea is that you'd notice that your new git binary is trying to get access to /var/postgres, and you'd deny it, because it has no reason to want that.
That's not incompatible with sandboxing applications to limit the damage a malware can do.
Even on a regular user's "workstation" there's no need for every single app to access every single directory / every single network drive with rw permission etc.
P.S: FWIW the backup procedure I put in place doesn't just encrypt/compress/deduplicate the backups, it also compares the backup to previous backups (comparing size gives an idea, for example), then also verifies that the backup can be decrypted, using a variety of metrics (for example if, after decrypting then decompressing the backup a Git repo backup is found, it'll run "git fsck" on it, if a file with a checksum is found, it'll verify that file's checksum, etc.). Already helped us catch not a malware but a... bitflip! I figured out that if a procedure can help detect a single bitflip, it probably can help detect malware-encrypted data too. I'm not saying it's 100% foolproof: all I'm saying is there's a difference between "we're sandboxing stuff and running some checks" vs "we allow every single application to access everything on all our machines because we need users to access files".
Would like more details on the mini PC. Processor, RAM, price. Is it fanless.