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CryptoWall, one of a family of malware programs that encrypts files and demands a ransom from victims, has undergone a revamp that is frustrating security researchers.
Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group has now analyzed a second version of CryptoWall that has improvements that make it harder to detect and study.
The sample of CryptoWall analyzed by Cisco was sent via email in a ".zip" attachment. Contained in that attachment is an exploit that uses a Microsoft privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2013-3660 ( http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-3660 ), to gain greater control over the computer, Carter said.
If opened, CryptoWall doesn't decrypt its whole binary but instead just a small part, which then checks to see if it is running in a virtual environment, Carter said.
CryptoWall won't continue to decrypt itself if it is running in a virtual machine. Files are sometimes analyzed in a sandbox within a virtual machine to check if they're possibly malicious.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2865303/cryptowall-ransomware-variant-gets-new-defenses.html
Cisco has a full technical writeup on its blog. http://blogs.cisco.com/security/talos/cryptowall-2
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday January 11 2015, @05:07PM
ultimately, if you have a mathematical mind, all computing is a state machine. The state change from being "without malware" and "with malware" is clearly atomic and usually (USB/CDROM excepted!!) network transmitted.
Hence, if the network traffic is sandbox and perhaps network *initiated* actions caught by COW, I would think this malware would be foiled.
But as we know.. "There are two sorts of people in this world. Those who backup and those who WILL back up...." (D.Adams).