New Snake Ransomware Adds Itself to the Increasing Collection of Golang Crimeware

We are just about 1 month into 2020, and so far, there has been no break in the ongoing flurry of new or varied ransomware campaigns. Amongst the well-established families (Ryuk, Maze, REvil) we now have another to add to the list…”Snake”. To read more: https://labs.sentinelone.com/new-snake-ransomware-adds-itself-to-the-increasing-collection-of-golang-crimeware/

SentinelLabs has observed the Snake ransomware in targeted campaigns over the last month. While it contains all the hallmarks of standard ransomware, there are a few traits that make it stand out as more aggressive and more complex.

Snake is written in Golang, which has been seen in many recent ransomware families. Golang is an open-source programming language, with a degree of cross-platform support. It is for these same reasons that some RaaS (Ransomware as a Service) offerings utilize the language as well. One such example would be Project Root.

Upon infection, relevant files are overwritten with encrypted data. Each modified file is also ‘tagged’ at the end of the file with the string “EKANS” (Snake backwards).