LockBit attacks ASEAN-Korea Centre
Incident Date:
November 5, 2023
Overview
Title
LockBit attacks ASEAN-Korea Centre
Victim
ASEAN-Korea Centre
Attacker
Lockbit
Location
First Reported
November 5, 2023
LockBit Ransomware Group's Recent Attack on ASEAN-Korea Centre
LockBit ransomware group has attacked ASEAN-Korea Centre. The victim organization has a deadline of 21 November to reach out and pay the ransom, otherwise the criminal group will publish all compromised files. The ASEAN-Korea Center is an international organization with the mandate to promote economic and socio-cultural relations between ASEAN and Korea.
Through numerous activities, the Centre actively engages its stakeholders to create an environment for mutually beneficial and sustainable cooperation in various fields such as trade, investment, culture, tourism, and people-to-people exchanges.
About LockBit Ransomware
LockBit is a RaaS that has been active since 2019 and is highly adept at security tool evasion as well as boasting an extremely fast encryption speed. LockBit is noted for multiple means of extortion where the victim may also be asked to pay a ransom any sensitive information exfiltrated in the attack in addition to paying a ransom for the encryption key.
LockBit employs publicly available file sharing services and a custom tool dubbed Stealbit for data exfiltration. LockBit was by far the most active attack group in 2022 and continued to be the leading attack group in the first half of 2023. LockBit has demanded ransoms in excess of $50 million and hit the world’s biggest computer chip maker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), with a $70 million ransom demand in July. LockBit continues to innovate their RaaS platform following the release of LockBit 3.0 in June of 2022, and introduced what is considered to be the first iteration of a macOS ransomware variant in April of 2023. The latest versions incorporate advanced anti-analysis features and are a threat to both Windows and Linux systems. LockBit 3.0 is modular and configured with multiple execution options that direct the behavior of the ransomware on the affected systems.
Technical Details and Targets
LockBit employs a custom Salsa20 algorithm to encrypt files. LockBit takes advantage of remote desktop protocol (RDP) exploitation for most infections, and spreads on the network by way of Group Policy Objects and PsExec using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. LockBit appears to also still be supporting the older LockBit 2.o variant from 2021, where the encryptor used is LockBit 2.0 but the victim is named on the LockBit 3.0 leak site.
LockBit tends to target larger enterprises across any industry vertical with the ability to pay high ransom demands, but also have tended to favor Healthcare organizations. LockBit is a very well-run affiliate program and has a great reputation amongst the affiliate (attacker) community for the maturity of the platform as well as for offering high payouts of as much as 75% of the ransom proceeds.
Recent Ransomware Attacks
The Recent Ransomware Attacks (RRA) site acts as a watchtower, providing you with near real-time ransomware tracking of attacks, groups and their victims. Given threat actors’ overarching, lucrative success so far, ransomware attacks have become the most ubiquitous, and financially and informationally impactful cyber threat to businesses and organizations today.
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