VERY IMPORTANT

Last week, an Endgame researcher was analyzing spam emails for indications of emergent malicious activity. The researcher came upon an interesting set of emails, which were soon determined to be part of a widespread spam campaign. The emails all highlighted the successful delivery of a package, which can be tracked by simply clicking on a link. This is especially interesting timing. At the peak of procrastinators filing their taxes at the last minute, those who send in their tax forms are exactly the technically less-sophisticated users these kinds of campaigns target. We rapidly determined that this spam campaign was attempting to broadly deliver TeslaCrypt 4.1A to individuals. In the subsequent sections, we’ll detail the various stages of the TeslaCrypt 4.1A attack chain, moving from infiltration to detection evasion, anti-analysis and evasion features, entrenchment, and the malicious mission, concluding with some points on the user experience.