High
Ensiko is a PHP web shell with ransomware capabilities that targets various platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, or any other platform that has PHP installed. The malware has the capability to remotely control the system and accept commands to perform malicious activities on the infected machine. It can also execute shell commands on an infected system and send the results back to the attacker via a PHP reverse shell. It is capable of scanning servers for the presence of other webshells, defacing websites, sending mass emails, downloading remote files, disclosing information about the affected server, brute-force attacks against file transfer protocol (FTP), cPanel, and Telnet, overwriting files with specified extensions, and more.
The malware uses PHP RIJNDAEL_128 with CBC mode to encrypt files in a web shell directory and subdirectories and appends filenames with the “.bak” extension.
The malware also drops an index.php file and sets it as the default page using a .htaccess file; the attacker is also notified of this action via email.
To carry out more tasks on an infected system, the malware can load various additional tools onto an infected system. Most of these tools are loaded from Pastebin. The malware creates a directory called tools_ensikology to store these tools.
There is a technique in which a malicious actor hides code within the exchangeable image file format (EXIF) headers of an image file and uses a PHP function called exif_read_data to extract and run this code on an affected server. The steganologer function identifies images with EXIF headers and labels them as a logger.