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Trojan.Killdisk is a new disk-wiping malware recently discovered by security researchers. The wiper attacks are targeted towards Ukraine in support of the Russian invasion, and these signatures can also be seen in attacks in Lithuania. Targeted sectors are aviation, defense, IT services, and financial sector.
HermeticWiper (Trojan.Killdisk) is interestingly digitally signed by a certificate issued to Hermetica Digital Ltd (the origin of the name).
It contains 32-bit and 64-bit driver files which are compressed by the Lempel-Ziv algorithm stored in their resource section. The driver files are signed by a certificate issued to EaseUS Partition Master. The malware will drop the corresponding file according to the operating system (OS) version of the infected system. Driver file names are generated using the Process ID of the wiper. – Security Researchers
Upon execution, HermeticWiper will damage the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the victim’s system, which will render it inoperable. Organizations compromised using this wiper date back to November of 2021. A Microsoft SQL Server vulnerability was also used to attack organizations in Ukraine and along with the wiper, ransomware was also deployed against affected organizations.
After HermeticWiper, another data-wiper to hit Ukraine is the IsaacWiper which is less sophisticated than HermeticWiper but may be related to it. The wiper enumerates the physical and logical drives and then recursively wipes the files off of each disk. A new version of the data-wiper also contains debug logs. With log messages like: