"AcidRain Malware Shuts Down Thousands of Modems in Ukraine"

According to a recent Viasat report, a cyberattack rendered Viasat KA-SAT modems nonfunctional throughout Ukraine on February 24. As a result of the attack, remote monitoring and control of 5,800 Enercon wind turbines in Germany were disabled. A recently discovered data wiper malware that wipes routers and modems was found to be the source of the attack. The malware, dubbed AcidRain, was used to wipe SATCOM modems from the KA-SAT satellite broadband service. Thousands of modems in Ukraine and tens of thousands more across Europe were affected by this incident. When threat actors execute wiper malware, they do not commonly demand a ransom. Wiper malware is instead used to destroy or wipe data. Between 2012 and 2016, the Shamoon strain infected Saudi Aramco and other Middle Eastern oil corporations, breaching computers and destroying more than 30,000 hard drives using a direct drive access driver called RawDisk. AcidRain can brute-force device file names and wipe any files it finds. A Viasat company blog post said the incident started when high volumes of focused malicious traffic were detected coming from several SurfBeam2 and SurfBeam 2+ modems and associated customer premise equipment located in Ukraine and serviced by one of the KA-SAT network partitions. Many modems struggled to stay online as a result of this targeted Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. The network lost tens of thousands of modems, and they did not try to reconnect. Six strains of wiper malware have been linked to the conflict in Ukraine since the beginning of 2022. These strains include WhisperKill, WhisperGate, HermeticWiper, IsaacWiper, CaddyWiper, and DoubleZero. AcidRain is now the seventh wiper strain to hit Ukraine. This article continues to discuss the AcidRain data wiper malware incident, the concept of wiper malware, other wiper malware strains, and the widespread use of wiper malware attacks. 

Security Intelligence reports "AcidRain Malware Shuts Down Thousands of Modems in Ukraine"