:: Deepquest ::

Conti ransomware looks for and executes DLLs in its current directory. Therefore, we can potentially hijack a DLL to execute our own code and control and terminate the malware pre-encryption. The exploit dll will check if the current directory is “C:WindowsSystem32” and if not we grab our process ID and terminate. We do not need to rely on hash signatures or third-party products as the malware’s own flaw will do the work for us. Endpoint protection systems and or antivirus can potentially be killed prior to executing malware, but this method cannot as there’s nothing to kill the DLL that just lives on disk waiting. From a defensive perspective you can add the DLLs to a specific network share containing important data as a layered approach. All basic tests were conducted successfully in a virtual machine environment.