A Ransomware That Is Royal

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 







Overview

First discovered in September 2022, Royal ransomware is a group of threat actors that had targeted more than 350 million known victims worldwide, and their ransom demand have exceeded 275 USD till now. Previously, this ransomware was linked to another ransomware family, Zeon, that started in January 2022. 

Interestingly, they do not hire affiliates to promote their Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. This group is mainly made up of the former members of Conti ransomware group. This fact give them experience and a solid base to carry out their extorting activities across the globe. They threatened certain critical infrastructure sectors like, manufacturing, healthcare, and education industry.

Methodology

This ransomware group uses following multiple initial access vectors to secure access into vulnerable systems:
  1. Callback phishing
  2. SEO poisoning 
  3. Exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) accounts
  4. Compromised credentials

They make use of the unique partial encryption approach allowing the threat actor to choose a specific percentage of data in a file to encrypt. It helps the ransomware to evade detection and save the encryption percentage for larger files. Besides, they also go for double extortion tactics publicly threatening the release of encrypted data if the victim does not pay the ransom. 

Prevention

General methods to combat a ransomware attack are as follows-
  • Mandatory strong password policies and multi-factor authentication for all critical services.
  • Use updated or modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools.
  • Employ advanced endpoint security products on all endpoints.
  • Regularly update all the software and operating systems. 
  • Have the least privilege approach to security, including the removal of all the unnecessary access to administrative shares and other services.
  • Administer a solid backup strategy including offline, encrypted, and immutable backup of data.


Conclusion

Royal ransomware has been widely active since few years and still using a variety of tools to aggressively target critical infrastructure organizations. The best security practices should be implemented and organizations must be wary of this ongoing ransomware. 























































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