It's a new year, and with it comes a new ransomware called Babuk Locker that targets corporate victims in human-operated attacks.
Babuk Locker is a new ransomware operation that launched at the beginning of 2021 and has since amassed a small list of victims from around the world.
From ransom negotiations with victims seen by BleepingComputer, demands range from $60,000 to $85,000 in Bitcoin.
Each Babuk Locker executables analyzed by BleepingComputer has been customized on a per-victim basis to contain a hardcoded extension, ransom note, and a Tor victim URL.
According to security researcher Chuong Dong who also analyzed the new ransomware, Babuk Locker's coding is amateurish but includes secure encryption that prevents victims from recovering their files for free.
"Despite the amateur coding practices used, its strong encryption scheme that utilizes Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman algorithm has proven effective in attacking a lot of companies so far," Dong stated in
his report.
