Lindsay Kaye

Ransomware, and malware as a whole, does not exist in a vacuum; it is often developed to accomplish a goal, whether to further an espionage campaign or for monetary gain. Ransomware, in particular, is a fast-moving landscape driven by an intricate web of operators, tools and mystery. BlackMatter ransomware emerged in July 2021 as the successor to DarkSide ransomware, only to be shut down a few short months later...or was it? Besides amassing a large portfolio of victims, the BlackMatter operators released several versions of the ransomware. Recorded Future was the first to openly publish technical details on BlackMatter, as well as interview the ransomware operators themselves. In this session, we will take you through our discovery of the BlackMatter ransomware group and its evolution through the shutdown as well as provide a technical deep dive on the Windows, PowerShell and Linux ransomware itself. We will also address how this evolution trend shows up in the larger ransomware ops

Ransomware actors continue to evolve their tools and TTPs; innovation by cybercriminals in response to global and local events is nothing new. However, recently we have observed several interesting innovations - some very successful for the threat actors, some not so much. We will present case studies, including technical deep-dives on a few of these, including: ALPHV’s Morph AV-evasion tool, usage of an access token to prevent chat hijacking, ARM locker and blog of indexed victim files, LockBit’s adoption of the BlackMatter code, PLAY ransomware’s evolution to use ROP, and multiple actors’ implementations of intermittent file encryption. We will also discuss what made some of these new TTPs effective for the threat actors’ business, and what made them less successful, both at the technical and human intelligence levels. During the talk, we will highlight particular areas that created the most trouble for threat actors, and often made them easier to track. Finally, we will discuss how