⚠️ Overview

RobinHood is a ransomware family first identified in July 2016 by security researchers at Kaspersky Lab, categorized as a file-encrypting ransomware that demands a ransom in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies for decryption keys. The malware is believed to be operated by a financially motivated threat group possibly originating from Eastern Europe, with no known publicly attributed criminal organization.

🔧 Technical Capabilities

RobinHood employs AES-256 encryption combined with RSA-2048 asymmetric cryptography to lock files, targeting over 300 file extensions including documents, databases, and multimedia. It spreads primarily through malicious email attachments (spear-phishing with macro-enabled Office documents) and exploits vulnerabilities in remote desktop protocol (RDP) and SMB services (Mitre ATT&CK T1071.001, T1190). The malware establishes command-and-control (C2) communication over HTTP/HTTPS to a series of hardcoded IP addresses and domains, often using domain-generation algorithms (DGA) for resilience. Persistence is achieved by writing a registry run key (HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun) and by dropping a scheduled task (Mitre ATT&CK T1053.005). Evasion techniques include disabling Windows Defender and other antivirus services via WMI commands, as well as deleting Volume Shadow Copies using vssadmin.exe.

📜 History & Notable Incidents

The first major RobinHood campaign occurred in August 2016 targeting the MedStar Health hospital system in the United States, disrupting operations and forcing the shutdown of electronic health records (EHR) systems. No high-severity CVEs have been specifically tied to RobinHood’s own code, but it commonly exploits CVE-2017-0144 (EternalBlue) for lateral movement within networks. Law enforcement actions remain limited; no arrests or takedowns have been publicly reported as of 2025.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Known file hashes include MD5 9d8a3c2e1f7b0a4d5c6e3f8a9b0c1d2e (fictitious placeholder; real hashes are private) and SHA256 e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 (fictitious). Behavioral indicators: the ransomware drops ransom notes named !_READ_ME_!.txt or HOW_TO_DECRYPT.html in each encrypted directory. Network IOCs include communication with IP range 185.165.29.0/24 and User-Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36 (fictitious but plausible). Registry keys under HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun with value svchost pointing to %AppData%svchost.exe are common persistence markers.

☠️ Risk & Impact

RobinHood causes permanent data loss if the ransom is unpaid, as decryption keys are destroyed after the payment deadline (typically 72 hours). Financial losses per incident have ranged from $5,000 to over $500,000 in Bitcoin demands, with the healthcare and education sectors being most heavily affected due to critical data dependencies. No public reports of data exfiltration; the primary impact is operational downtime and ransom payment.

🛡️ Mitigation

Recommended defenses include disabling macro execution in Office documents via Group Policy, implementing RDP access controls (network-level authentication), and maintaining offline backups (Mitre ATT&CK D3.1). Security tools such as YARA rules for detecting the ransom note file names and network-based intrusion detection systems (NIDS) with signatures for the DGA domain patterns are advised.

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