WastedLocker: technical analysis

WastedLocker: technical analysis

The use of crypto-ransomware in targeted attacks has become an ordinary occurrence lately: new incidents are being reported every month, sometimes even more often.


On July 23, Garmin, a major manufacturer of navigation equipment and smart devices, including smart watches and bracelets, experienced a massive service outage. As confirmed by an official statement later, the cause of the downtime was a cybersecurity incident involving data encryption. The situation was so dire that at the time of writing of this post (7/29) the operation of the affected online services had not been fully restored.


According to currently available information, the attack saw the threat actors use a targeted build of the trojan WastedLocker. An increase in the activity of this malware was noticed in the first half of this year.


We have performed technical analysis of a WastedLocker sample.


Command line arguments


It is worth noting that WastedLocker has a command line interface that allows it to process several arguments that control the way it operates.


 -p <directory-path>


Priority processing: the trojan will encrypt the specified directory first, and then add it to an internal exclusion list (to avoid processing it twice) and encrypt all the remaining directories on available drives.


 -f <directory-path>


Encrypt only the specified directory.


 -u username:password \hostname


Encrypt files on the specified network resource using the provided credentials for authentication.


 -r


Launch the sequence of actions:


Delete ;
Copy to %WINDIR%system32<rand>.exe using a random substring from the list of subkeys of the registry key SYSTEMCurrentControlSetControl;
Crea ..

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