Ukraine has come under a fresh cyber onslaught from Russia that involved the deployment of a previously undocumented Golang-based data wiper dubbed SwiftSlicer.
ESET attributed the attack to Sandworm, a nation-state group linked to Military Unit 74455 of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).
“Once executed it deletes shadow copies, recursively overwrites files located in %CSIDL_SYSTEM%\drivers, %CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE%\Windows\NTDS and other non-system drives and then reboots computer,” ESET disclosed in a series of tweets.
The overwrites are achieved by using randomly generated byte sequences to fill 4,096 byte-length blocks. The intrusion was discovered on January 25, 2023, the Slovak cybersecurity company added.
“Attackers deployed the SwiftSlicer wiper using Group Policy of Active Directory,” Robert Lipovsky, senior malware researcher for ESET, told The Hacker News. “Once SwiftSlicer malware is executed, it corrupts users files and makes the computer unbootable.”
Sandworm, also tracked under the monikers BlackEnergy, Electrum, Iridium, Iron Viking, TeleBots, and Voodoo Bear, has a history of staging disruptive and destructive cyber campaigns targeting organizations worldwide since at least 2007.
images from Hacker News
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