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Evelina Kealohanui
In computer security, a wiper is a class of malware intended to erase (wipe, hence the name) the hard drive or other static memory of the computer it infects, maliciously deleting data and programs.
Several variants of wiper malware were discovered during the 2022 Ukraine cyberattacks on computer systems associated with Ukraine. Named CaddyWiper, HermeticWiper, IsaacWiper, and FoxBlade by researchers, the programs showed little relation to each other, prompting speculation that they were created by different state-sponsored actors in Russia especially for this occasion.[11]
So I guess everyone who prints with PETG has encountered the issue of the wiper not wiping the filament off the hot end properly and dragging PETG strings across the print. I get notified of a possible spaghetti detection, after checking the print which is fine, I notice a clump of filament on the nozzle that the wiper failed to wipe off. Are bambulab going to improve the wiper? I found this great improvement on 3D printables: Printables
I used a silicon wiper for years on my Geetech A20M ( a really really bad stock machine ), but with some mods and the addition of a purge bucket it was good enough to print part with two materials with good transition between materials.
Had our Formlabs 3L a week or so now.
Attempting print with Elastic 50A.
Wiper arm keeps detaching in same location(left hand side) when returning to home position.
The carrier at least seems to return at a slower pace to pick the wiper up but this is adding a ton of time to print and is disconcerting to say the least
It is also happening on every layer as far as I can see - is this normal?
I took the wiper out and slightly bent the springy tabs that lock it into place in the outwards direction. This gave them more friction against that docking position on the far left. Tried a new print and it worked!
A Wiper Attack involves wiping/overwriting/removing data from the victim. Unlike typical cyber attacks which tend to be for monetary gain, wiper attacks are destructive in nature and often do not involve a ransom. Wiper malware may however be used to cover the tracks of a separate data theft.
In parallel with the war in Ukraine, cybersecurity researchers have witnessed a sudden increase in the number of wiper malware deployments. Although these haven't been officially attributed to Russian state-sponsored threat actors, their goals align with the Russian military's. It is widely theorized that these cyberattacks are intentionally being launched in concert with the invasion.
With wiper malware in the spotlight, we at FortiGuard Labs wanted to provide more information on this threat to help organizations understand it and implement better protections against them. In this blog, the following topics will be discussed:
The wiper term in wiper malware comes from its most basic function, when the objective of the malware is to wipe (erase) the hard disk of the victim machine. More generically, wiper malware can be defined as malicious software that tries to destroy data. As we will see in the following sections, there are different ways to accomplish this.
In this section, we will look at the different motivations behind deploying a wiper malware. While its goals are straightforward, that does not mean that the motivation is always the same. We distinguish between the following four potential motivators: financial gain, destruction of evidence, sabotage, and cyberwar.
In general, financial gain is the least significant motivator for wiper malware. This is understandable because it is hard to monetize destruction. However, one aspect we wanted to point out here is the fake ransomware variant that pretends to encrypt data and ask for a ransom, but without the capability to recover data. This could be called a ransomware scam because the ransomware concept is fraudulent. Threat actors employing such techniques are simply looking to make a quick buck without investing in developing an actual ransomware tool or in the administration work behind an actual ransomware operation. Of course, such an enterprise is short-lived because once it gets out that it is not possible to recover data, nobody will pay the ransom.
This is a hard-to-prove motivator, but sometimes when there is no other reason to deploy a wiper in an attack, it may be concluded that the real reason was something else, such as espionage. The wiper is only deployed after the true goal of the attack is achieved. Instead of meticulously erasing their tracks and all evidence of their attack, the attackers simply deploy a wiper malware in the organization. This not only erases the evidence, but the scale of the destruction causes the defenders to focus on the recovery of data and operations and not on investigating the intrusion.
Sabotage is the most obvious reason to deploy a wiper. Just as the Stuxnet malware was used to destroy centrifuges to slow down Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, wiper malware could be used to destroy data, sabotage development, cause financial loss, or just cause chaos.
An interesting and recent example is the suspicion that the AcidRain wiper was used in an attack against the Viasat KA-SAT satellite broadband service provider. The attacker gained access to the management infrastructure of the provider to deploy AcidRain on KA-SAT modems used in Ukraine. The attack also rendered 5,800 wind turbines inaccessible in Germany.
As discussed, many wiper malware samples pretend to be ransomware. This means they leverage many of the typical Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) that actual ransomware uses, but they do this without the possibility of recovering the files. In theory, standard ransomware can also be used as a wiper if the decryption key is never provided to the victim. In that case, the encrypted files are practically lost. However, after detailed analysis, it is apparent in many cases that the ransomware functionality is just a ruse, and in reality, the malware is a wiper. There could be a couple of reasons to do this:
An excellent example of the latter is the infamous NotPetya malware from 2017. It was the most devastating malware so far. It started with a supply chain attack against Ukrainian companies through updates from a small Ukrainian accounting software company. However, it did not stop there. Since NotPetya was a worm, it also exploited vulnerabilities in other software to propagate. This was so efficient that it quickly became a global problem, crippling networks without discrimination. It went to great lengths to imitate ransomware, such as encrypting files, providing a Bitcoin address for payment, and delivering a ransom note. However, in reality, it was a wiper that just destroyed data. It was attributed to the Sandworm actors, who are associated with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, often referred to as GRU.
As with NotPetya, we can see that a significant property of wipers is whether or not they are self-propagating. If it is a worm, such as NotPetya, it will self-propagate to other machines once it is let loose. It is not necessarily possible to control them any longer in such a case.
This does not mean, of course, that non-self-propagating malware cannot be devastating. If the domain controller is compromised in a network, it can be used to deploy the wiper on all machines in the organization. The main difference is that self-propagating malware cannot be controlled once it has been unleashed.
The most trivial approach for wipers is to simply enumerate the filesystem and overwrite the selected files with data. We discussed earlier that Ordinypt used this approach, overwriting files with zero (0x00) bytes.
Another good example is the WhisperGate wiper deployed against Ukrainian organizations earlier this year. It had various stages and components, but the second stage (stage2.exe) downloaded the file corrupter component from a hardcoded Discord channel. This component goes through specific folders looking for files with file extensions hardcoded in the malware. These files are different data files. The malware replaces the content of the files with 1 MB of 0xCC bytes and adds a 4-character long random extension. It is worth noting that WhisperGate also pretended to be ransomware, even though it corrupts files beyond repair.
As mentioned earlier, encrypting a file and destroying the key is essentially equivalent to destroying the file. Of course, a brute-force attempt could be made to recover the file, but if proper encryption algorithms are used, this approach is quite hopeless. However, encryption rather than simply overwriting is very resource-intensive and slows down the malware. The only use case for implementing encryption in a wiper is when the authors want to keep up the appearance of being ransomware for as long as possible. This was the case with NotPetya, which did encrypt files properly.
Many wipers also make sure to overwrite the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the disk. This part of a disk tells the computer how to boot the operating system. If the MBR is destroyed, the computer won't start. However, this does not mean that the data on the hard disk has been destroyed. If only the MBR is corrupted, the data can still be recovered. By itself, it can only be used to cause chaos and confusion, but no actual data loss. That is why it is usually used together with other techniques.
MFT stands for Master File Table, and it exists on every NTFS filesystem. This is basically a catalog of all the files that exist on the filesystem, their metadata, and either the file content or the location where the file content is stored. If the MFT is corrupted, the operating system won't be able to find the files. This is a very easy and fast way for wiper malware to make files disappear. The one drawback is similar to corrupting the MBR: the file content is not necessarily destroyed. While the few files stored directly in the MFT would be erased, most of the files are stored somewhere else on the disk, and the MFT only provides their location to the OS. Without the MFT, the OS won't be able to find the content, but the content is still there on the disk.
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