- Discovered by Kaspersky security researchers via a dark web ransomware forum ad spotted by the company's Darknet Threat Intelligence active monitoring system, Luna ransomware appears to be specifically tailored to be used only by Russian-speaking threat actors.
- "The advertisement states that Luna only works with Russian-speaking affiliates. Also, the ransom note hardcoded inside the binary contains spelling mistakes. For example, it says 'a little team' instead of 'a small team'," Kaspersky said.
- Luna (Russian for moon) adds a .luna extension to all encrypted files and it is very simple ransomware still under development,Β with limited capabilities based on the available command line options.
- It uses a not-so-common encryption scheme, combining fast and secure X25519 elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange using Curve25519 with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric encryption algorithm.
- The group behind this new ransomware developed this new strain in Rust and took advantage of its platform-agnostic nature to port it to multiple platforms with very few changes to the source code.Β
- "Both the Linux and ESXi samples are compiled using the same source code with some minor changes from the Windows version. The rest of the code has no significant changes from the Windows version," the researchers added.