With the daily growth of the different kinds of ransomware and distribution techniques, Fox-IT’s Security Operations Center was investigating a new ransomware called Mole. This ransomware is currently being spread by a social engineering exploit kit to trick the user in downloading a malicious executable.
The ransomware author of Mole made a small mistake, which gives everyone the statistics of all the infected clients.
Distribution of Mole
The social engineering exploit-kit tricks the user in downloading and installing a malicious “plugin” for Office.
After executing the malicious “plugin”, the user receives a fake pop-up displaying an error message. Although the message indicates that the installation has failed, it’s an indicator that ransomware is successfully executed. After displaying the fake error message, certain processes will be terminated, the Windows backups used for recovery will be deleted and the encryption process will be initiated.
Once the encryption process is done, all the files will have the .MOLE extension and a ransom note will be displayed. Currently it’s not possible to recover your files for free, the only solutions is to clean the pc from the infection and restore from a recent backup.
What makes this ransomware different?
Compared to all the other ransomware currently being spread, Mole isn’t any different.
Except that the author of the Mole-ransomware made a small mistake, the statistics of Mole’s infections are openly accessible.
While tracking the infection process, Fox-IT noticed a sudden growth in infections within few hours’ time. The current total of infections is 500+ and growing, further investigation indicates that almost 50% of the IP’s were unique. The fact that around the half of the IP’s are unique, could be because companies are being targeted.
| 1 | United States | 86 |
| 2 | Great Britain | 17 |
| 3 | Germany | 12 |
| 4 | Korea | 11 |
| 5 | India | 11 |
| 6 | Netherlands | 10 |
| 7 | China | 10 |
| 8 | Canada | 8 |
| 9 | France | 6 |
| 10 | Norway | 5 |
Top 10 unique IP infections per country
Indicators of compromise
Hash: 5ca18c9f5ec26a30de429accf60fc08b0ef785810db173dd65c981a550010dde (pluginoffice.exe)
Hash: e6591a9389c7b82d59949b8c5660e773b86dff1fa3909f780cb8c88bbc85646c (plugin-office.exe)
Hostname: digitalecosystems.com (download)
Hostname: network.mrtg.belcenter.net (download)
Hostname: brutenutrition.net (download)
Hostname: bettermannow.com (download)
IP: 212.47.254.187 (C2 server)
Ransom note:
All your important files were encrypted on this computer.
You can verify this by click on see files an try open them.
Encryption was produced using unique public key RSA-1024 generated for this computer.
To decrypted files, you need to obtain private key.
The single copy of the private key, with will allow you to decrypt the files, is locate on a secret server on the internet.
The server will destroy the key within 78 hours after encryption completed.
To retrieve the private key, you need to Contact us by email , send us an email your DECRYPT-ID-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx number
and wait for further instructions.
For you to be sure, that we can decrypt your files – you can send us a single encrypted file and we will send you back it in a decrypted form.
Please do not waste your time! You have 72 hours only! After that The Main Server will double your price!E-MAILS ADRESS:
oceanm@engineer.com
oceanm@india.com