Alert (AA22-321A): #StopRansomware: Hive Ransomware

Description

FortiGuard Labs is aware of that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a joint advisory for Hive ransomware as part of their #StopRansomware effort. Hive ransomware is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) consisting of developers and affiliates. It attempts to steal data, encrypt files on victims' machines, and demand ransom recover affected files and prevent stolen data from being published to their data leak site, called "HiveLeaks," on the DarkWeb.


Why is this Significant?

This is significant because Hive is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) that, according to the advisory, has victimized more than 1,300 enterprises globally and extorted 100 million US dollars. The group has been active since June 2021 and did not only target private enterprises but also essential industries such as government organizations and healthcare services.


What is Hive Ransomware?

Hive is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) consisting of two groups: developers and affiliates. Hive developers create, maintain, and update Hive ransomware and infrastructures such date leak site named "HiveLeaks" and negotiant site. Hive affiliates are responsible for finding and infecting victims, exfiltrating files, and deploying Hive ransomware to the victims' network.


The latest Hive ransomware iterations are written in the Rust programing language. Older variants are written in Go.


Reported initial infection vectors include emails, exploiting vulnerabilities such as CVE-2020-12812, CVE-2021-31207, CVE-2021-34473 and CVE-2021-34523.

Hive ransomware encrypts files on victims' machines and typically appends a ".hive" file extension to the affected files. It also drops a ransom note named "HOW_TO_DECRYPT.txt", which instructs victims to visit a negotiation site on TOR.

The advisory states that Hive ransomware is known to victimize organizations that were previously infected with Hive ransomware and recovered without paying ransom.


What is the Status of Protection?

FortiGuard Labs provides the following AV signatures for recent Hive ransomware samples that we collected:


  • W32/Filecoder_Hive.A!tr.ransom
  • W32/Filecoder_Hive.B!tr.ransom
  • W32/Hive.4a4e!tr.ransom
  • W32/Hive.B0FF!tr.ransom
  • W32/Hive.d10e!tr.ransom
  • W32/Hive.FD38!tr.ransom
  • W64/Filecoder.AW!tr.ransom
  • W64/Filecoder_Hive.A!tr.ransom
  • W64/Filecoder_Hive.B!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.31ec!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.6bcb!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.71de!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.7cec!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.933c!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.A!tr
  • W64/Hive.B0FF!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.c2e4!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.e550!tr.ransom
  • W64/Hive.ea51!tr.ransom
  • W32/Filecoder.507F!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.0b0f!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.32a5!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.65e3!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.69ce!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.6d49!tr.ransom
  • W32/Agent.7c49!tr.ransom
  • W64/Agent.U!tr

All network IOCs on the advisory are blocked by Webfiltering.


FortiGuard Labs provides the following IPS signatures for the vulnerabilities reportedly exploited as initial infection vector by Hive threat actors:


  • MS.Exchange.MailboxExportRequest.Arbitrary.File.Write (CVE-2021-31207)
  • MS.Exchange.Server.Autodiscover.Remote.Code.Execution (CVE-2021-34473)
  • MS.Exchange.Server.Common.Access.Token.Privilege.Elevation (CVE-2021-34523)