In late February, the first instance of wiper malware was detected targeting Ukrainian government systems named IsaacWiper. Several strains have been identified that caused significant damage to both Russian and Ukrainian side with following strains verified by the CERT-UA, a Computer Emergency Response Team for Ukraine. Multiple parties are involved targeting mostly Russian and Ukrainian infrastructure with DDOS attacks and wiper malware. We have seen many cases of cyber-attacks as part of a larger cyberwar that is still ongoing. Since Russia declared war on Ukraine on the grounds, a different kind of war started online. The entire process ensures to cause enough damage to the data so that it is unretrievable. To do this, malware ensures any FAT and NTFS partitions are corrupted, and might even corrupt log files, common folders, and perform similar activity for any backups it has access to. With disks overwritten and Master Boot Record corrupted, wiper malware may continue operating further to ensure the target system is completely inoperable. After physical drive enumeration, most wiper malware corrupts the first 512 bytes of the physical drives which is the Master Boot Record, which renders the system unbootable. By exploiting drives malware can get access to physical drives and gather more information regarding its partitions.

From there, wiper malware usually deploys compressed resources of drivers with target OS version in mind.

Wipers gain access to the target filesystem via Windows API calls, by abusing the raw disk or by abusing other system drivers.

Technical analysis of most wiper malware reveals custom written applications that abuses partition management drivers to carry out the infection. We on-ramp, develop, nurture, build, enhance, operationalize, inject confidence, and empower our customers.

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Disk wiper