Walmart Dissects New 'Sugar' Ransomware

The cyber threat team at retail giant Walmart has dissected a new ransomware family dubbed Sugar, which is available to cybercriminals as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS).

The Sugar ransomware family is written in Delphi and borrows objects from other ransomware families out there. It was initially spotted in November 2021, but hasn’t been detailed before.

Unlike the most prevalent ransomware families out there, Sugar mainly targets individual computers rather than enterprise networks, but that doesn’t make it less dangerous, especially since it is offered as a RaaS.

According to Walmart, one of the most interesting features of Sugar is its crypter. Not only does it employ a modified version of the RC4 encryption, but code from the crypter is being reused in the ransomware itself.

Because of that, Walmart believes that either both the Sugar ransomware and its crypter are the work of the same developer, or the crypter is being offered to affiliates as part of the service.

[READ: Sophisticated Noberus Ransomware First to Be Coded in Rust]

“The malware is written in Delphi but the interesting part […] was the reuse of the same routine from the crypter as part of the string decoding in the malware, this would lead us to believe that they have the same dev and the crypter is probably part of the build process or some service the main actor offers to their affiliates,” Walmart’s researchers note.

The ransomware’s analysis also brought to light similarities with the ransom note employed by REvil ransomware operators – but also differences and misspellings – and similarities between Sugar’s decryptor page and that of Cl0p.

Furthermore, Walmart’s security researchers found similarities with GPLib, a library that contains procedures and functions for encryption and decryption operations.

“The file encryption piece for samples we analyzed appears to be using the SCOP encryption algorithm,” they note.

With major ransomware operations announcing shutdowns (such as BlackMatter) or being the target of law enforcement actions (REvil), new RaaS operations have a lot of space to prosper and even become established threats.