CaddyWiper malware discovered in Ukraine systems: All you need to know

A new destructive malware has been discovered in Ukraine. The CaddyWiper malware is actually the third strain of wiper malware to hit Ukrainian systems since the Russia Ukraine war began. CaddyWiper was discovered security researchers from ESET,  a Slovakia-based cybersecurity firm. ESET discovered the malware on Monday and posted a thread of tweets about the same.
What does CaddyWiper do?
CaddyWiper affects your data. As per the researchers, the tool erases not just user data, but even partition information from any drives that were unfortunate to be connected to an affected machine. The thread suggests that CaddyWiper works corrupting files on a machine and overwriting them with null te characters, losing the user data forever in the process. Unlike a ransomware malware,  a wiper malware is used to permanently delete data from an affected PC. It is a more directly destructive approach and has nothing to do it extracting money from victims.

“We know that if the wiper works, it will effectively render the system useless,” Jean-Ian Boutin, head of threat research at ESET, told The Verge. “However, it is unclear at this point what is the overall impact of this attack.”
Check it out below.

#BREAKING #ESETresearch warns about the discovery of a 3rd destructive wiper deployed in Ukraine 🇺🇦. We first observed this new malware we call #CaddyWiper today around 9h38 UTC. 1/7 pic.twitter.com/gVzzlT6AzN
— ESET research (@ESETresearch) March 14, 2022
Boutin also added that seemingly not a lot of devices were infected with CaddyWiper yet, and that ESET’s research had only observed one organisation being targeted the malware.
Not the first malware to hit Ukraine
Two other strains of wiper malware targeting Ukraine’s computers were also discovered in recent weeks amidst the Russian invasion. HermeticWiper, the first of the two strains was discovered on February 23, a day before the Russian conflict began.
Meanwhile, IsaacWiper was deployed in Ukraine on February 24. That said, a timeline shared ESET also suggests that the two malware attacks could have been strategically planned as they had reportedly been in development months before their release.