
In January, we saw a variant of the disk-wiping KillDisk malware hitting several financial institutions in Latin America. One of these attacks was related to a foiled heist on the organization’s system connected to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication’s (SWIFT) network.
Last May, we uncovered a master boot record (MBR)-wiping malware in the same region. The telltale sign was a problem related to the affected machine’s boot sector. Based on the error message it displayed after our tests, we were able to ascertain that this was another — possibly new — variant of KillDisk. This kind of notification is common in systems affected by MBR-wiping threats and not in other malware types such as ransomware, which some people initially believed to be the culprit. Trend Micro products detect this threat as TROJ_KILLMBR.EE and TROJ_KILLDISK.IUE.
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