Norsk Hydro suffers $40M+ in damages from LockerGoga ransomware attack

Norsk Hydro, one of the largest aluminum producers in Norway have been hit by ransomware known as LockerGoga. The financial damage to the company is severe and is reported to exceed $40M. After temporarily shutting down operations, some areas of the company have switched to manual mode and are reportedly slowly recovering. Norsk Hydro is not the only company reported to have been hit by this ransomware. Back in late January 2019 the ransomware was reported to have been used in an attack against French engineering consulting firm Altran Technologies.  Although the internals of the malware are unsophisticated, the damage can be catastrophic if planted strategically and targeted toward high profile businesses.

Infection Cycle:

Upon execution, the User Account Control dialog displays the following information showing ALISA LTD as the “Verified publisher”.  It has a properly signed and valid certificate:

Embedded in the executable file is the following script:

The executable file also contains a list of file types to encrypt.  It is evidently aimed at businesses as it focuses primarily on Documents, spreadsheets and database files:

It encrypts files on the system and gives each encrypted file a .locked extension.  In addition to the above filetypes, other filetypes such as .exe, .dll and .inf are also encrypted.

During the infection process there is reasonably high CPU usage from multiple copies of tgytutrc776.exe (copy of original file).  Multiple copies are used in an effort to speed up the encryption process:

The trojan drops the following readme file onto the system:

%PUBLIC%\Desktop\README_LOCKED.txt

We reached out to the operators via the provided email addresses but are yet to receive a reply.

SonicWALL Capture Labs provides protection against this threat via the following signatures:

• GAV: LockerGoga.RSM (Trojan)
• GAV: LockerGoga.RSM_3 (Trojan)

Also, this threat is detected by SonicWALL Capture ATP w/RTDMI and the Capture Client endpoint solutions.

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The SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Research Team gathers, analyzes and vets cross-vector threat information from the SonicWall Capture Threat network, consisting of global devices and resources, including more than 1 million security sensors in nearly 200 countries and territories. The research team identifies, analyzes, and mitigates critical vulnerabilities and malware daily through in-depth research, which drives protection for all SonicWall customers. In addition to safeguarding networks globally, the research team supports the larger threat intelligence community by releasing weekly deep technical analyses of the most critical threats to small businesses, providing critical knowledge that defenders need to protect their networks.