New Agenda Ransomware Variant, Written in Rust, Aiming at Critical Infrastructure

Dec 19, 2022Ravie Lakshmanan

A Rust variant of a ransomware strain known as
Agenda has been observed in the wild, making it
the latest malware to adopt the cross-platform programming language
after BlackCat, Hive, Luna, and
RansomExx^[1].

Agenda^[2], attributed to an
operator named Qilin, is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group
that has been linked to a spate of attacks primarily targeting
manufacturing and IT industries across different countries.

A previous version of the ransomware, written in Go and
customized for each victim, singled out healthcare and education
sectors in countries like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa,
and Thailand.

Agenda, like Royal ransomware, expands on the idea of partial
encryption (aka intermittent encryption) by configuring parameters
that are used to determine the percentage of file content to be
encrypted.

“This tactic is becoming more popular among ransomware actors as
it lets them encrypt faster and avoid detections that heavily rely
on read/write file operations,” a group of researchers from Trend
Micro said^[3]
in a report last week.

An analysis of the ransomware binary reveals that encrypted
files are given the extension “MmXReVIxLV,” before proceeding to
drop the ransom note in every directory.

In addition, the Rust version of Agenda is capable of
terminating the Windows AppInfo process and disabling User Account
Control (UAC), the latter of which helps mitigate the impact of
malware by requiring administrative access to launch a program or
task.

“At present, its threat actors appear to be migrating their
ransomware code to Rust as recent samples still lack some features
seen in the original binaries written in the Golang variant of the
ransomware,” the researchers noted.

“Rust language is becoming more popular among threat actors as
it is more difficult to analyze and has a lower detection rate by
antivirus engines.”