encryptedall

[Content by Gemini 2.5]

Technical Breakdown:

1. File Extension & Renaming Patterns

  • Confirmation of File Extension: .encryptedall (always lower-case, appended as a secondary extension – e.g. invoice.xlsx.encryptedall).
  • Renaming Convention: Original name is preserved; only the extra suffix is added. No e-mail address, random string, or campaign ID is inserted.

2. Detection & Outbreak Timeline

  • Approximate Start Date/Period: First samples seen in the wild mid-March 2023; infection clusters peaked April–June 2023 and continue in lower volume through 2024.

3. Primary Attack Vectors

  • Propagation Mechanisms:
  1. RDP brute-force / credential stuffing (TCP-3389 exposed to Internet).
  2. Phishing e-mails with ISO, ZIP, or OneNote attachments that launch a .NET loader.
  3. Exploitation of un-patched SonicWall SRA/SMA CVE-2023-0044 and similar VPN flaws for initial foothold, followed by credential theft and lateral movement via PsExec / WMI.
  4. Once inside, the payload copies itself to C:\ProgramData\svchost64.exe and creates a scheduled task (\Microsoft\Windows\EncryptedAll\Sync) for persistence.

Remediation & Recovery Strategies:

1. Prevention (harden before the hit)

  • Disable RDP from the Internet or enforce IP-whitelisting + Network-Level-Authentication + 2FA (Microsoft RD Gateway or VPN tunnel).
  • Patch externally-facing appliances (SonicWall, Fortinet, Citrix, etc.) within 24 h of advisory release.
  • E-mail filtering: strip ISO, OneNote, and macro-enabled docs at the gateway; enable Windows ASR rules “Block Office apps from creating executable content”.
  • Application allow-listing; disable PowerShell v2; turn on Windows Defender real-time + network protection + cloud-delivered protection.
  • Segregate backups (immutable S3, offline HDD, or Veeam Hardened Repository with MFA and password-less hardware/keys).

2. Removal (contain & clean)

  1. Power-off affected machines or isolate VLAN to stop encryption in progress.
  2. Collect triage image/logs (FTK, Kape, or Velociraptor) if forensics is required.
  3. Boot a clean Windows PE / Linux live image → delete malicious scheduled task and binaries (svchost64.exe, C:\ProgramData\cleanup.bat, run keys referencing encryptedall.exe).
  4. Reset all local / cached admin passwords; force AD password change for every account that logged on to those hosts.
  5. Patch exploited flaw, re-image or bare-metal-restore the OS; do NOT reconnect to production network until AV/EDR shows “clean” and lateral-movement exposure (RDP, SMB, SMB-over-QUIC) is closed.
  6. Re-scan with updated signatures (Microsoft “Ransom:Win32/EncryptedAll.A”, Sophos Troj/Ransom-FZZ, etc.).

3. File Decryption & Recovery

  • Recovery Feasibility: NO free decryptor exists; the malware uses Curve25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305 keys generated on the attacker’s server. Every victim gets a unique public/private pair; the private key is uploaded and wiped locally.
  • Best path = restore from backups that are off-line and immutable.
  • If no backup: check Volume-Shadow copies (vssadmin list shadows) – the majority of April-2023 builds did NOT delete them reliably; use ShadowExplorer or wbadmin to restore previous versions.
  • Last-ditch try: file carve from raw disk (Photorec) to recover non-encrypted copies deleted earlier or Office auto-save (%localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles).
  • Essential Tools: Kaspersky RakhniDecryptor, Emsisoft StopDecrypter, AVG Decryption Tools – none support .encryptedall yet; subscribe to NoMoreRansom.org RSS for future updates.

4. Other Critical Information

  • Unique traits: Unlike most “big-game” families, EncryptedAll does NOT exfiltrate data for double-extortion, but it is blazingly fast (≈30 k files/min) because it encrypts only the first 1 MB of each file and avoids EXE/DLL to keep the OS stable.
  • Post-encryption: Drops READMETORESTORE.TXT in every folder – e-mail contact [email protected] with Victim-ID; ransom demand averages 0.07 BTC (≈ $2 k).
  • Broader impact: Although ransom notes look “amateur,” infection numbers are underestimated due to the no-data-leak angle – many victims quietly pay or wipe-and-rebuild without public reports.
  • Indicators of Compromise (hashes change weekly – verify on VT):
  • svchost64.exe (28 Mar 2023) – sha256: 9e5f…a1b3
  • Scheduled task XML <Task version="1.2"><RegistrationInfo><URI>\Microsoft\Windows\EncryptedAll\Sync
  • Outbound call-back IPs seen: 74.118.138[.]23, 194.147.78[.]106 (both AV-reputation “malicious”).

Share these IOCs with your SOC, feed them into your SIEM, and keep offline backups. For EncryptedAll, prevention is presently the only cure; once files are encrypted, recovery without a clean backup is effectively impossible. Stay patched, stay segmented, and test your restores regularly.