Novel Dark Power ransomware emerges with global attacks

BleepingComputer reports that the newly emergent Dark Power ransomware operation has already compromised 10 organizations in the U.S. and other parts of the world since Jan. 29, with impacted entities being demanded to pay $10,000 as ransom. Based on the Nim programming language, the Dark Power payload facilitates the creation of a randomized 64-character long ASCII string to commence the encryption algorithm upon its execution before it proceeds with ending certain machine services and processes, as well as the Volume Shadow Copy Service and data backup services, a report from Trellix revealed. After other anti-malware software solutions are killed, Dark Power then undergoes a 30-second sleep as it deletes Windows system logs and the console to prevent data analysis. Researchers also noted the existence of two Dark Power payloads in the wild, the first of which hashes the ASCII string with the SHA-256 algorithm, with the result split into an AES key and an initialization vector, while the other leverages SHA-256 digest as the AES key, with a 128-bit value set as the encryption nonce.