Loading story…
The Blue Locker ransomware operation encrypted servers and virtual machines at Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL), Pakistan’s second-largest oil and gas producer, disrupting financial operations for two days. The attackers reportedly deleted backups and claimed to have exfiltrated roughly 1 TB of data, although PPL denied that sensitive information was affected; Pakistan’s National CERT subsequently issued an emergency advisory to 39 government ministries and institutions.
First observed in late 2021, Blue Locker employs double extortion, pairing encryption with data theft and private ransom negotiations via ProtonMail, Jabber, and Tox. Attribution remains unresolved: Resecurity has associated the operation with the likely Iranian-origin Proton ransomware family, while other researchers have linked the .blue extension and restore_file.txt ransom-note artifacts to the publicly available MemeCryptor codebase.
TTPs, infrastructure, and targeting history in one profile.
5 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Blue Locker attacked Pakistan Petroleum Limited, encrypting servers and virtual machines, deleting backups, and disrupting financial operations for two days. The attackers claimed to have exfiltrated about 1 TB of business and employee data, while PPL denied that sensitive data had been compromised.
ReversingLabs observed the .blue ransomware family and published a YARA rule for it.
Microsoft added the detection signature Ransom:Win32/BlueLocker.MK!MTB for Blue Locker.
Blue Locker ransomware was first observed around November 2021 and remained relatively low-profile until 2025.
Following the PPL incident, Pakistan's National CERT issued an emergency advisory to 39 government ministries and institutions. The recipients were warned about the threat and were not publicly confirmed as Blue Locker victims.
Vulnerabilities, threat actors, malware, products, organizations, breaches, and observables Mallory has linked to this story. Indicator values are masked here and available in full in the app.
Indicator values are masked on this page. View all 25 in Mallory Domains, IPs, hashes, and URLs are exportable to your SIEM.
See this adversary's TTPs, infrastructure, and targeting history, correlated against your exposure.
2 references tracked. Mallory keeps watching after this page renders.
Map indicators from this story to your assets and identify affected systems in minutes.
Every observed campaign, victim, and pivot linked to actors named in this story.
Malware, exploits, and IOCs connected to the activity described here.
YARA, Sigma, and Snort rules deployed to your SIEM as soon as they’re published.
Get matching new stories delivered to your team as they break — not the next morning.
Ask questions about this story and take action on the answers.
Other stories Mallory is tracking that overlap on entities, sources, or topic labels.
Blue Locker ransomware resurfaced after an attack on Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL), Pakistan’s second-largest oil and gas producer, reportedly encrypting servers and virtual machines, deleting backups, and disrupting financial operations for two days. The operators claimed to have exfiltrated roughly **1 TB** of data, a claim PPL disputed. Pakistan’s National CERT subsequently issued an emergency advisory to 39 government ministries and institutions; PPL remains the only publicly confirmed victim in the reporting. First observed in 2021 and circulating broadly by early 2022, Blue Locker has been distributed through phishing, social engineering, trojanized remote-access software, and malicious torrent or peer-to-peer downloads. It appends the `.blue` extension, leaves ransom notes directing victims to ProtonMail, and is associated with a double-extortion chain involving PowerShell loaders, privilege escalation, security-tool impairment, data theft, shadow-copy deletion, and service termination. Attribution is unresolved: artifacts have been linked to the likely Iranian-associated Proton ransomware family and the public MemeCryptor codebase, while Chinese-language strings are assessed as likely false flags. Microsoft Defender detects the threat as `Ransom:Win32/BlueLocker.MK!MTB`, and ReversingLabs has published a YARA rule for pre-encryption detection.
Sep 25, 2026
**ProLock** ransomware was used in targeted intrusions against organizations after attackers gained access through **QakBot**, phishing campaigns, and exposed or compromised **RDP** services. Reporting linked ProLock to the earlier **PwndLocker** family and described it as the final stage of a broader compromise in which operators conducted reconnaissance, abused legitimate Windows processes, and used batch scripts, **Task Scheduler**, and **PowerShell** to deploy the encryptor across victim environments. Once executed, ProLock disabled processes and services, deleted shadow copies, and encrypted files larger than `8,192` bytes while leaving the first `8,192` bytes intact before appending the `.prolock` extension and dropping ransom notes. The campaign drew additional scrutiny after the **FBI** warned that some victims who paid received a faulty decryptor that corrupted files instead of restoring them, underscoring both the operational risk of payment and the likelihood that data theft could accompany the encryption phase.
Aug 15, 2026
Attackers brute-forced the `sa` account on an internet-facing Microsoft SQL Server and escalated a compromise into a full BlueSky ransomware deployment in about 32 minutes. After access was obtained, they enabled `xp_cmdshell`, launched PowerShell payloads, established a Cobalt Strike beacon, and used Tor2Mine tooling to disable antivirus, create persistence, and install an XMRig-based Monero miner. The intrusion then expanded through remote service creation and SMB activity toward domain controllers and file shares before the ransomware binary, masquerading as `vmware.exe`, was executed on the initial host. Files were encrypted with the `.bluesky` extension and a ransom note named `# DECRYPT FILES BLUESKY #.txt` was dropped, while investigators reported no evidence of data exfiltration. BlueSky is a Windows-focused ransomware family observed since 2022 that has been distributed through phishing emails, phishing sites, and trojanized downloads in addition to direct server compromise. Technical analysis shows the malware adjusts privileges, hides threads from debuggers, creates a mutex, and selectively skips some system-related files and directories while targeting user and database data. It accelerates encryption across local and network resources using multithreading and Windows I/O completion ports, stores recovery-related data in the Windows registry, terminates selected processes before encryption, appends the `.bluesky` extension to locked files, and generates ransom notes in both TXT and HTML formats.
Aug 14, 2026