Petya is a family of encrypting malware that was first discovered in 2016. The malware targets Microsoft Windows–based systems, infecting the master boot record to execute a payload that encrypts a HDD or SSD file system table and performs a fake CHKDSK after a restart. This prevents Windows from booting, as the master boot record is overwritten; subsequently, Petya demands that users make a Bitcoin payment to regain access. Variants of Petya were first seen in March 2016, which propagated via infected e-mail attachments. In June 2017, a new variant of Petya was used for a global cyberattack, primarily targeting Ukraine. The new variant propagates via the EternalBlue exploit, which is generally believed to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and was used earlier in the year by the WannaCry ransomware. Kaspersky Lab referred to this new version as NotPetya to distinguish it from the 2016 variants, due to these differences in operation. Although it appeared to be ransomware, due to its lack of a decryption method, it was equivalent to a wiper. The NotPetya attacks have been blamed on the Russian government, specifically the Sandworm hacking group within the GRU Russian military intelligence organization, by security researchers, Google, and several governments.
History Petya was discovered in March 2016; Check Point noted that while it had achieved fewer infections than other ransomware active in early 2016, such as CryptoWall, it contained notable differences in operation that caused it to be "immediately flagged as the next step in ransomware evolution". Another variant of Petya discovered in May 2016 contained a secondary payload used if the malware cannot achieve administrator-level access. The name "Petya" (Russian diminutive of Peter) is a reference to the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, wherein Petya is one of the two Soviet weapon satellites which carry a "Goldeneye"—an atomic bomb detonated in low Earth orbit to produce an electromagnetic pulse. A Twitter account that Heise suggested may have belonged to the author of the malware, named "Janus Cybercrime Solutions" after Alec Trevelyan's crime group in GoldenEye, had an avatar with an image of GoldenEye character Boris Grishenko, a Russian hacker and antagonist in the film played by Scottish actor Alan Cumming. On 30 August 2018, a regional court in Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast of Ukraine convicted an unnamed Ukrainian citizen to one year in prison after pleading guilty to having spread a version of Petya online.
2017 Cyberattack
On 27 June 2017, a major global cyberattack began (Ukrainian companies were among the first to state they were being attacked), utilizing a new variant of Petya. On that day, Kaspersky Lab reported infections in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but that the majority of infections targeted Russia and Ukraine, where more than 80 companies were initially attacked, including the National Bank of Ukraine. ESET estimated on 28 June 2017 that 80.0% of all infections were in Ukraine, with Germany second hardest hit with about 9%. Russian president Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, stated that the attack had caused no serious damage in Russia. Experts believed this was a politically-motivated attack against Ukraine, since it occurred on the eve of the Ukrainian holiday Constitution Day. Oleksandr Kardakov, the founder of the Oktava Cyber Protection company, emphasized that the Petya virus stopped a third of Ukraine's economy for three days, resulting in losses of more than 400 million dollars. Kaspersky dubbed this variant "NotPetya", as it has major differences in its operations in comparison to earlier variants. McAfee engineer Christiaan Beek stated that this variant was designed to spread quickly, and that it had been targeting "complete energy companies, the power grid, bus stations, gas stations, the airport, and banks". It was believed that the software update mechanism of M.E.Doc—a Ukrainian tax preparation program that, according to F-Secure analyst Mikko Hyppönen, "appears to be de facto" among companies doing business in the country—had been compromised to spread the malware. Analysis by ESET found that a backdoor had been present in the update system for at least six weeks prior to the attack, describing it as a "thoroughly well-planned and well-executed operation". The developers of M.E.Doc denied that they were entirely responsible for the cyberattack, stating that they too were victims. On 4 July 2017, Ukraine's cybercrime unit seized the company's servers after detecting "new activity" that it believed would result in "uncontrolled proliferation" of malware. Ukraine police advised M.E.Doc users to stop using the software, as it presumed that the backdoor was still present. Analysis of the seized servers showed that software updates had not been applied since 2013, there was evidence of Russian presence, and an employee's account on the servers had been compromised; the head of the units warned that M.E.Doc could be found criminally responsible for enabling the attack because of its negligence in maintaining the security of their servers. The IT businessman and chairman of the supervisory board of the Oktava Capital company Oleksandr Kardakov proposed to create civil cyber defense in Ukraine.
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