Satancrypt

Overview

Executive Summary

Infection Vector and Technical Capabilities

• Service Termination and Defense Evasion: The malware actively attempts to terminate endpoint security services and crucially, stops database services (SQL Server, Exchange, MySQL) using command-line tools to ensure those files are unlocked and available for encryption. It also deletes Volume Shadow Copies (`vssadmin.exe Delete Shadows`) to prevent easy data restoration.
• Rapid Encryption: It utilizes strong cryptography (AES+RSA) to encrypt user files, databases, and network shares. The encrypted files are appended with the `.satan` or `.satancrypt` extension, and a ransom note (`HELP_DECRYPT_FILES.html`) is dropped into every affected directory.
• Lateral Movement: Satancrypt variants are known to contain built-in lateral movement capabilities, attempting to spread to other machines on the local network using tools like Mimikatz to dump credentials and pass-the-hash.

Threat Assessment

Incident Response and Remediation

• Immediate Network Segmentation: Do not simply turn off the machines, as this destroys volatile memory forensics. Instantly sever the network connection of all infected machines from the internet and the rest of the LAN to halt lateral movement and data exfiltration.
• Engage Incident Response: Immediately engage specialized third-party Incident Response and legal counsel. Do not attempt to negotiate with the threat actors without professional guidance.
• Eradication and Recovery: Eradicating ransomware requires a complete infrastructure rebuild. All affected machines must be wiped to bare metal and rebuilt from known-good, offline backups. All enterprise credentials must be rotated globally.

Known aliases

Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:

• Ransomware.Satan
• Trojan-Ransom.Win32.SatanCrypt
• Win32/Satana

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

This family has been observed using the following ATT&CK techniques: T1486 T1489 T1490 T1078

Generated Detections (Boilerplate)

These YARA and Sigma rules are auto-generated based on the family name and aliases. They must be heavily tuned before deployment in a production environment.

YARA Rule

rule MALWARE_WIN_SATANCRYPT {
    meta:
        description = "Detects Satancrypt (ransomware)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Boilerplate Generator"
        date = "2026-07-06"
    strings:
        $s1 = "satancrypt" ascii wide nocase
        $s2 = "ransomware.satan" ascii wide nocase
        $s3 = "trojan-ransom.win32.satancrypt" ascii wide nocase
        $s4 = "win32/satana" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

Sigma Rule

title: Suspicious Satancrypt Activity
id: adef01f0fbf181f3bd603c5fc69b345b
status: experimental
description: Detects generic indicators of the satancrypt malware family.
logsource:
    category: process_creation
    product: windows
detection:
    selection:
        Image|endswith:
            - '\cmd.exe'
            - '\powershell.exe'
        CommandLine|contains:
            - "*satancrypt*"
            - "*ransomware.satan*"
            - "*trojan-ransom.win32.satancrypt*"
            - "*win32/satana*"
    condition: selection
level: medium

References & External Analysis

• Search "satancrypt" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Families (Category: ransomware)

Explore other malware families in the same category:

• Staget
• Sennaonemaker
• Imaut
• Tirrip
• Redlonam

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://jordan123234-malware-families-explorer.static.hf.space/api/satancrypt.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.