Running the risk: How we unleashed our version of NotPetya on global commodities trading firm, Trafigura

Back in June 2017, the fast moving, data destroying NotPetya worm hit and rightly made organisations sit up and think about how they could defend against such an attack.

Instead of a worm that encrypted data which could be recovered by paying a ransom, NotPetya had been designed to rip through infrastructure and destroy any of the hosts it was able to.

The potential impact of a ransomware worm is something that would be better to know before, rather than in the midst of an attack and in order to help organisations understand the impact that sophisticated ransomware and malware would have, our Exploit Development Group created a benign malware simulator called EternalGlue.

To coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, The Innovator’s latest issue takes a look at how companies can thrive and survive in the digital age. Our groundbreaking work around the replication of the NotPetya worm simulation in the form of a malware simulator features as a case study detailing how we worked with global commodities trading firm, Trafigura.

Trafigura’s Chief Information Security Officer, Mark Swift gives his account of how and why he came to us for an innovative and unique way to replicate NotPetya across the company’s networks and to truly put its defences to the test.

Ollie Whitehouse, Global Chief Technology Officer at NCC Group commented: “Our work with Trafigura has been a particularly exciting project to work on as they enabled us to push the boundaries almost at every step, balancing confidence and risk to ensure we were able to carry out the simulation in a real-world environment.

Engagements like this give us the opportunity to gain better understanding of current threats and are the reason we do what we do.”

To gain more of an insight into our engagement with Trafigura read the article in full over at The Innovator’s website here. Issue 12, page 22: https://innovator.news/the-innovator-magazine-4ef4b3e6b39b

To read more about our EternalGlue malware simulator click below:

EternalGlue: Rebuilding NotPetya to assess real world resilience: https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2017/september/eternalglue-part-one-rebuilding-notpetya-to-assess-real-world-resilience/