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Data Storage Security IT

Synolocker 0-Day Ransomware Puts NAS Files At Risk 150

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the you-have-an-offsite-backup-right? dept.
Deathlizard (115856) writes "Have a Synology NAS? Is it accessible to the internet? If it is, You might want to take it offline for a while. Synolocker is a 0-day ransomware that once installed, will encrypt all of the NAS's files and hold them for ransom just like Cryptolocker does for windows PC's. The Virus is currently exploiting an unknown vulnerability to spread. Synology is investigating the issue."
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Synolocker 0-Day Ransomware Puts NAS Files At Risk More

Synolocker 0-Day Ransomware Puts NAS Files At Risk

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  • This is how we learn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:10AM (#47605423)

    not to connect your NAS directly to the internet.

    • The problem is Synology advertises it as a replacement for your router/firewall as well. I always thought that was stupid. I mean, I get the draw of "only having one box", but I don't know why you'd ever directly expose your personal data to the internet that way.

  • You do have backups, right?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Of course. But they are on another similar box connected to the internet of things which was crypted earlier.

    • Backup? What do people usually use NAS for, I always thought it's mostly for ripped/torrented movies and backups of other computers. Neither of these need backups.

      • They may have some unhappy customers right now; but 'NAS', in Synology's product lineup, includes a variety of devices that are aimed either at reasonably serious users or very serious pirates.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          They may have some unhappy customers right now; but 'NAS', in Synology's product lineup, includes a variety of devices that are aimed either at reasonably serious users or very serious pirates.

          Translation: They have a built-in torrent client and FTP server. Therefore you can practically smell the salt water reeking from ye digital box.

          I love how certain tools label people as scurvy dogs hell-bent on illegal activities.

          • Re:Nuke it from orbit, then restore from backups. (Score:5, Funny)

            by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @06:12AM (#47605709)

            The deluxe edition comes with an eye-patch. They initially offered a parrot, but there where some shipment incidences*.

            *: There's still some debate about the actual status of the parrots upon arrival. Synology insists on the parrots' being alive, but there have been customer reports on the parrots being: "passed on", "no more", "ceased", "expired and gone to meet it's maker", "a stiff", "Bereft of life", "resting in peace", among others.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by neoform ( 551705 )

              Synology's NAS OS has a nice built in BT client with built in search that goes to all your favorite sites.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by TyFoN ( 12980 )

                The NAS OS is linux and the BT client is just transmission with a web interface.

                But it is nicely put together :)

            • Synology now insists that this in fact reflective of their move to quantum computing technology, and that the parrot is both alive and dead.

          • Quite the opposite. Being satisfied with the built in bittorrent clients, or FTP in general, suggests somewhat casual activity; but if you are buying your piracy gear based on its support for lots of iSCSI LUNs, 10GbE, and availability of rackmount expansion enclosures with redundant power supplies I would say that you are pretty serious about it...

            I don't know how successful they've been in terms of market share; but their pitch for most of the 'rackstation' line suggests that they are hoping for relati

      • Re:Nuke it from orbit, then restore from backups. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @06:13AM (#47605715)

        My Synology NAS is my home-based business' file server, a local machine backup (for my development machine and my digital audio workstation), and a media server for my ripped DVDs and Blurays, although this third function is just a nice bonus for me. Synology NAS devices have a very handy cloud backup application as well, which I use to backup all my most critical files to Amazon S3 services. I hope most people made use of this, because if Cryptolocker has taught us anything, it's that you absolutely need offsite backups that are NOT connected to your network.

        I bought it specifically because it makes it easy to set up a multi-tiered backup strategy like that - something that takes on new importance when you spend a few years writing code on your own dime. As a file server, it's fantastic for small operations. I had a drive begin to fail last year, and so had a chance to test out the hot-swapping / RAID rebuilding feature. Worked like a charm - was super simple and zero down-time.

        Personally, I've never once considered opening up my NAS to the outside internet. That always seemed crazy risky to me - after all, a single software mistake, a buffer overrun in a protocol stack of some sort, and *poof*, there's direct access to your file server and all it's critical data. I guess sometimes being paranoid pays off, but it gives me no pleasure to say so.

        • S3? Yuck. Their pricing is horrendous. I'd suggest crashplan.

          http://www.code42.com/crashplan/ [code42.com]
          http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/CrashPlan_Headless_Client [synology.com]

          Although the synology forums are currently getting destroyed (guessing from this article).

        • You do realize that for the S3 backup to work Synology or the NAS (and the NAS has you Synology login info) has your login information for S3, and that if this thing is owning the NAS there is a pretty damn good chance the malware has owned your S3 instance as well right? The only way it wouldn't is if the S3 backup is totally manual.

          • That's actually a very good point. The S3 backup is completely automated which means, of course, that everything the malware would need to screw with your S3 (or other) account is right there for the taking - the keys have to be local and accessible. Granted, we haven't heard any confirmation of this malware having those sorts of capabilities, but we've seen incredibly sophisticated banking trojans out in the wild that do things that are far more sophisticated.

            Damn. Well, all the more reason to stay patc

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by heypete ( 60671 )

            You do realize that for the S3 backup to work Synology or the NAS (and the NAS has you Synology login info) has your login information for S3, and that if this thing is owning the NAS there is a pretty damn good chance the malware has owned your S3 instance as well right? The only way it wouldn't is if the S3 backup is totally manual.

            Amazon has a very extensive authentication system [amazon.com] -- you can easily configure the Synology with an S3 access key that only has "List Files" and "Upload Files" permissions, but not "Delete Files" or "Overwrite Files". This way, even if the Synology box gets owned or a user fat-fingers something, the files on S3 aren't at risk. You don't (and shouldn't) need to use your AWS root access keys for S3.

            I have a similar setup with Amazon's Glacier: my standard access key has only list, upload, and retrieve permissi

            • If the keys are stored on the box in any way then they are compromised because the box is. The synology box is rooted, any information stored on that box is compromised. If for example your root key for S3 is backed up on the NAS then it's compromised.

              People are glossing over this, if the box is rooted everything it knows and stores is compromised, that's how people need to be analyzing this instead of blowing it off as no big deal.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by heypete ( 60671 )

                If the keys are stored on the box in any way then they are compromised because the box is. The synology box is rooted, any information stored on that box is compromised. If for example your root key for S3 is backed up on the NAS then it's compromised.

                Agreed. That's why you shouldn't use the root S3 access key for anything (in fact, don't generate one at all). Use service-limited, least-access keys for AWS accounts: there's no reason a NAS should have an access key capable of creating EC2 instances. It should have list+write access only to S3 (and/or Glacier). If users want to delete files from S3, they should have to log in with a different user (perhaps to the AWS console) and specifically do that.

                Amazon provides good options in this regard, and it's t

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        Backups need backups too. Your data isn't safe unless there are 3 copies, working, backup, archive (minimum), one should be offline.

        • Backups need backups too. Your data isn't safe unless there are backups all the way down.

          But seriously, having two copies is enough most of the time, provided they are somewhat separate (i.e. not on two identical, connected NAS machines).

  • "Investagating"? (Score:3)

    by fnj ( 64210 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:40AM (#47605483)

    Really?

  • Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rebelwarlock ( 1319465 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:54AM (#47605531)
    So between TOR and bitcoin, they think they finally have a viable method of collecting on ransomware. Also, I found it interesting that they're asking specifically for 0.6BTC - that is, double what Cryptolocker is asking. I wonder if there's an intentional correlation there.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      My bit of pondering is whether that 0.6btc can be tracked/identified at companies handling bitcoins, and especially at companies converting between btc and real money?

      Could you basically get the police (Europol/Interpol?) involved, and when a company reports that a user is trying to use/convert the btc you paid with, have that user charged with ransoming data, or taking stolen goods (i.e. either as the original thief, or as a fence)?

      If the 0.6btc is acquired by the person via a laundry-service, charge him/h

      • Wasn't the whole objective of Bitcoin to create a system where you *couldn't* do that?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GNious ( 953874 )

          Bitcoins must, as far as I can tell, have something that identifies them; at the very least, you need to be sure that only 1 person mined a given coin (solved a given mathematical challenge), to avoid endless, easily mined coins.

          Am starting to think one should investigate the possibility of making a blacklist of coins known to be acquired via illegal methods.

          • Rereading your post, it looks like you weren't implying the link between a person and a bitcoin userid like I thought. But still, part of the value of bitcoins is that there is no central authority to revoke your currency. Hence the use in black market applications etc.

            Well, until that one group that has 50%+1 of the coins decides it wants to become that authority, I suppose.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Xenna ( 37238 )

      That's what I was thinking.

      Now this is just data, but what if this kind of thing gets used for real ransom demands?
      Like kidnapping someone's child and demanding ransom in bitcoin.
      Is it feasible that one could get away with that?

      Wouldn't that be the death of TOR and bitcoin?
      I mean I'm all for privacy but not if it facilitates kidnapping.

    • Clearly, ransoms are Veblen goods.

  • Cheeky bastards (Score:5, Funny)

    by CurryCamel ( 2265886 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @06:22AM (#47605739) Journal

    From TFA: the message that pops up to the victims ends with:

    Copyright 2014 SynoLocker(TM) All Rights Reserved.

    I have a real hard time respecting that copyright...

  • Update from Synology-sec issue patched 12/2013 (Score:5, Informative)

    by bhoar ( 1226184 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @06:52AM (#47605839)
    Updated posted 8/5/2014 by Jeremie on the English language Synology Forum: [We’d like to provide a brief update regarding the recent ransomware called “SynoLocker,” which is currently affecting certain Synology NAS servers. Based on our current observations, this issue only affects Synology NAS servers running some older versions of DSM (DSM 4.3-3810 or earlier), by exploiting a security vulnerability that was fixed and patched in December, 2013. At present, we have not observed this vulnerability in DSM 5.0.]

  • There is no mention in the article of this being a zero day vulnerability, in fact the article specifically says "it’s not clear yet how SynoLocker’s operators installed the malware".

    As others have said Synology is reporting the vulnerability was patched in December [synology.com]. Hardly a zero day.

  • /.ed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by simplypeachy ( 706253 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @08:22AM (#47606169)

    Forum post so far:

    Hello Everyone,

    We’d like to provide a brief update regarding the recent ransomware called “SynoLocker,” which is currently affecting certain Synology NAS servers.

    Based on our current observations, this issue only affects Synology NAS servers running some older versions of DSM (DSM 4.3-3810 or earlier), by exploiting a security vulnerability that was fixed and patched in December, 2013. At present, we have not observed this vulnerability in DSM 5.0.

    For Synology NAS servers running DSM 4.3-3810 or earlier, and if users encounter any of the below symptoms, we recommend they shut down their system and contact our technical support team here: https://myds.synology.com/supp... [synology.com].

    -When attempting to log in to DSM, a screen appears informing users that data has been encrypted and a fee is required to unlock data.
    -A process called “synosync” is running in Resource Monitor.
    -DSM 4.3-3810 or earlier is installed, but the system says the latest version is installed at Control Panel > DSM Update.

    For users who have not encountered any of the symptoms stated above, we highly recommend downloading and installing DSM 5.0, or any version below:
    -For DSM 4.3, please install DSM 4.3-3827 or later
    -For DSM 4.1 or DSM 4.2, please install DSM 4.2-3243 or later
    -For DSM 4.0, please install DSM 4.0-2259 or later

    DSM can be updated by going to Control Panel > DSM Update. Users can also manually download and install the latest version from our Download Center here: http://www.synology.com/suppor... [synology.com].

    If users notice any strange behavior or suspect their Synology NAS server has been affected by the above issue, we encourage them to contact us at security@synology.com.

    Apologies for any problems or inconvenience caused. We will keep you updated with latest information as we address this issue.

  • As for the article...

    First part says "According to the user, there’s a small window of opportunity to minimise the damage. That is, if you can backup files faster than the program encrypts them."

    Then buried where many don't wonder (towards the end, it mentions "1) Power off the DiskStation immediately to avoid more files being encrypted"

    I would think the wise thing would be to exchange the location of the two sentences. least you have some would be hero actually try to find where to start saving at.

  • I misread this as

    Synolocker 0-Day Ransomware Puts NSA Files At Risk

    That would have been a much more interesting article to read, methinks :)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The Virus is currently exploiting an unknown vulnerability to spread.

    Are all the security geeks busy at Blackhat such that nobody realized this mistake?

  • Here I was, reading the headline as:

    Synolocker 0-Day Ransomware Puts NSA Files At Risk

    If only....

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