Locky has continued to evolve since its inception in February 2016. This has made it difficult to track at times due to changes in the way in which it’s distributed as well as various characteristics of the malware itself. The actors responsible for Locky have continuously attempted to improve operational security (OPSEC) in regards to the tracking of affiliates making use of the ransomware. This post will discuss a new Locky configuration extractor that Talos is releasing, which we are naming ‘LockyDump’. This is the first open source tool which can dump the configuration parameters used by all currently known variants of Locky e.g. .locky, .zepto & .odin based ransomware.
Using LockyDump you can run a known Locky sample within a virtualized environment and it will extract and provide all of the configuration information for the sample, including the AffilID associated with the sample. The latest variant of Locky made this extraction process increasingly difficult. Once this config extraction changed Talos looked to reverse further Locky samples in an attempt to gain the all important AffilID information. Obtaining the affiliate information for individual samples allows the historical tracking of Locky affiliates to identify trends and other characteristics on an individual affiliate basis such as their primary distribution method of choice e.g. through the use of Exploit Kits (EKs) or spam/phishing email.
