Pierluigi Paganini
January 25, 2016
TeslaCrypt is one of the most insidious ransomware first detected in the wild in 2015, today I have a good news for its victims.
TeslaCrypt was first detected in February 2015, the ransomware was able to encrypt user data including files associated with video games. In July, a new variant appeared in the wild, TeslaCrypt 2.0, the authors improved the encryption mechanism.
Both strains of the ransomware, TeslaCrypt and TeslaCrypt 2.0, are affected by a security flaw that has been exploited by security experts to develop a free file decryption tool.
The design issue affects the encryption key storage algorithm, the vulnerability has been fixed with the new release TeslaCrypt 3.0 which was improved in a significant way.
The security expert Lawrence Abrams published an interesting blog post detailing the issue, confirming that the decryption tool was available for a while but the news was not disclosed to avoid countermeasures of the malware developers.
Unfortunately, TeslaCrypt 3.0 resolves the issue, then research community decided to release decryption tools in the wild (i.e. TeslaCrack (https://github.com/Googulator/TeslaCrack).
“For a little over a month, researchers and previous victims have been quietly helping TeslaCrypt victims get their files back using a flaw in the TeslaCrypt’s encryption key storage algorithm. The information that the ransomware could be decrypted was being kept quiet so that that the malware developer would not learn about it and fix the flaw. Since the recently released TeslaCrypt 3.0 has fixed this flaw, we have decided to publish the information on how a victim could generate the decryption key for encrypted TeslaCrypt files that have the extensions .ECC, .EZZ, .EXX, .XYZ, .ZZZ,.AAA, .ABC, .CCC, and .VVV. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to decrypt the newer versions of TeslaCrypt that utilize the .TTT, .XXX, and .MICRO extensions.” wrote Abrams.
As explained in the post, files encrypted with the newer versions of TeslaCrypt are recognizable by the extension (.TTT, .XXX, and .MICRO) and cannot be decrypted.
TeslaCrypt encrypts files with the AES encryption algorithm and uses the same key for both encryption and decryption. Abrams explained that the threat generated a new AES key each time it was restarted, and that it stored the key in the files encrypted during the session. The information about the encrypted key was stored in each encrypted file, fortunately the size of this stored key was vulnerable to decryption through specialized programs. These programs are able to factorize these large numbers, extract their prime numbers and pass them to other specialized tools used to reconstruct the decryption key.
Another interesting tool for decrypting the files is TeslaDecoder, it has been available for decrypting TeslaCrypt files since May 2015 and it has been updated to recover the encryption key for all TeslaCrypt variants.
If you are one of the numerous victims of the TeslaCrypt ransomware, now you can recover your files using TeslaCracker or TeslaDecoder.
Good Luck
(Security Affairs – TeslaCrypt, ransomware)
