ebay

[Content by Gemini 2.5]

⚠ The text below is provided “AS-IS,” without warranty of any kind. It is intended for educational and incident-response purposes only.
If you are currently under active attack, immediately isolate the affected machines, power-off any unaffected backups that are still online, and engage your incident-response team or a qualified security firm.

Technical Breakdown

1. File-Extension & Renaming Patterns

  • Exact extension added: .ebay (sometimes appears in lower-case “ebay” only, but a few installers have been seen appending “.EBAY” in upper-case as well).
  • Renaming convention:
  • Original name: Annual_Report.xlsx
  • After encryption: Annual_Report.xlsx.ebay
    (Note: unlike some other families, the malware keeps the original file name intact and simply appends the extra suffix.)
  • Ransom note: A plain-text file dropped in every folder and the desktop – name variants include readme_ebay.txt, HOW_TO_RECOVER.txt or ebay_recovery.txt. Inside is a short message directing victims to a TOX chat ID or a qTox ID for negotiation.

2. Detection & Outbreak Timeline

  • First public submissions: mid-May 2022 (earliest samples on VirusTotal date to 17 May 2022).
  • Noticeable spike: late June – July 2022, when multiple ID-Ransomware uploads from North-America and Western-Europe appeared.
  • Still circulating in 2024: recent uploads show only minor repacks (new packer but identical payload), which indicates the group is re-using the same builder rather than rewriting the core.

3. Primary Attack Vectors

  • Exposed RDP (TCP/3389) or RDP-gateway brute-force / credential-stuffing remains the #1 inlet seen in victim tickets.
  • Secondarily: malicious e-mail attachments (ISO, ZIP→JS, or Word with rogue macros) that retrieve the .ebay loader from a Discord CDN URL or a throw-away GitHub repo.
  • A few reports mentioned exploitation of unpatched SonicWall SSLVPN appliances (CVE-2021-20016) – not the original break-in but used to maintain persistence before deploying the ransomware.
  • Lateral movement: credentials harvested with Mimikatz or PureCrypter, then WMI/psexec to push the exe named svchost32.exe to other hosts.

Remediation & Recovery Strategies

1. Prevention (harden before you need it)

  1. Close or 2-factor RDP; move it behind a VPN gateway if business-critical.
  2. Enforce unique, strong local-admin passwords (LAPS).
  3. Apply 2022-2023 Windows cumulative patches; the malware has no shiny zero-day – it simply relies on 2019-2021 bugs and weak credentials.
  4. Maintain at least two backup generations OFFLINE (physical pull or immutable object-lock).
  5. Mail-gateway rules: block ISO, IMG, VHD, macro docs originating from the Internet; disable Office macros by GPO.
  6. Keep EDR/AV in “block-unknown” mode; the current loader hashes are more than two years old and are correctly flagged by any reputable behaviour engine.

2. Removal (if you are already hit)

Step 1 – Contain

  • Physically disconnect or disable Wi-Fi on any infected endpoints; shut down non-encrypted VMs via hypervisor to prevent VHD-mount encryption.

Step 2 – Identify patient-zero

  • Look in C:\ProgramData\ and %TEMP% for files dated seconds before the first .ebay appearance: names such as svchost32.exe, winupdate.exe, dllhost.exe with a random 6-digit prefix.
  • Cross-check Windows event logs (4624/4625) for RDP or 4648 for credential-use; this usually points to the initial entry host.

Step 3 – Kill persistence

  • Delete scheduled task WindowsUpdateTask (description blank or “WindowsUpdate Check”).
  • Remove service WUpdServ pointing at the same rogue EXE.
  • Clean registry Run keys (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run) of any value that launches the above binaries.

Step 4 – Wipe & re-image OR clean-scan

  • Because several secondary back-doors (Cobalt Strike beacons and AnyDesk) are regularly dropped together with .ebay, the safest route is full OS re-image.
  • If re-imaging is impossible, boot into Safe-Mode, run an offline AV rescue disk, then 2-factor & patch the box before returning to production.

3. File-Decryption & Recovery

  • Reversible? NO – at the time of writing there is no free decryptor.
  • The malware uses Curve25519 for the elliptic-key exchange and AES-256 in CTR mode for file content; each file gets a unique AES key.
  • Private key remains only with the attacker; the embedded public key in the exe is not sufficient to reverse the process.
  • Your options:
  1. Restore from OFF-LINE backup (fastest).
  2. Roll back Windows-shadow copies if they survived – unfortunately the dropper runs vssadmin delete shadows /all early, so success is rare.
  3. File-carving / volume-dismount recovery: high effort, works only for very large files that were partially overwritten (last 1–2 MB of each file is usually lost).
  4. Paying the ransom: not recommended, provides no guarantee, and directly funds criminal activity; moreover, anecdotal reports show the actors demand 0.06-0.12 BTC then stop answering once payment lands.

4. Other Critical Information

  • No wiper functionality: .ebay does purposely skip %windir%, Program Files, and small text files (<1 MB) to keep the machine stable long enough for the victim to read the note and pay.
  • Embedded extension whitelist: .exe, .dll, .sys, .lnk, .ebay, .txt (readme files) – useful for forensics (“why were these folders untouched?”).
  • No C&C beacon for key exchange: everything is self-contained using hard-coded attacker public key; therefore blocking network egress does not stop encryption once it starts, but DOES stop the later exfil stage (several victims reported data leaks weeks later – expect a double-extortion follow-up).
  • Rapid encryption: the sample is multi-threaded; a 4-core box encrypts ~80 GB in under 25 min (measured in lab), so early detection is crucial.
  • Attribution: code overlap with “BlueSky” (2021) and “esla” (2022) suggests a single developer swapping branding. Ransom notes contain identical spelling mistakes (“your datas are encrypted”) and the same TOX ID across variants.

Bottom line: treat .ebay exactly like every modern ransomware – assume decryption is impossible, therefore back-ups, prompt patching, and credential hygiene are your only reliable shields.