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MITRE ATT&CK® Malware

S1162: Playcrypt

Playcrypt is a ransomware that has been used by Play since at least 2022 in attacks against against the business, government, critical infrastructure, healthcare, and media sectors in North America, South America, and Europe. Playcrypt derives its name from adding the .play extension to encrypted files and has overlap with tactics and tools associated with Hive and Nokoyawa ransomware and infrastructure associated with Quantum ransomware.[1][2][3]

EnterpriseS1162MalwareObject v1.0Modified
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

Security context for executives and security teams

Automation confidenceMedium

S1162: Playcrypt describes [Playcrypt](https://attack.mitre.org/software/S1162) is a ransomware that has been used by [Play](https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G1040) since at least 2022 in attacks against against the business, government, critical infrastructure, healthcare, and media sectors in North America, South America, and Europe. [Playcrypt](https://attack.mitre.org/software/S1162) derives its name from adding the .play extension to encrypted files and has overlap with tactics and tools associated with Hive and Nokoyawa ransomware and i...

Executive priority

S1162: Playcrypt is an official MITRE ATT&CK software. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.

Technical view

Security teams should validate S1162: Playcrypt by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (Windows), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.

Likely telemetry

  • Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
  • Network, endpoint, and security-tool telemetry

Detection direction

  • Validate whether S1162: Playcrypt appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
  • Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
  • Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.

Mitigation priorities

  • Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
  • Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
  • Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits

Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.

This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.

Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Playcrypt

Playcrypt is a ransomware that has been used by Play since at least 2022 in attacks against against the business, government, critical infrastructure, healthcare, and media sectors in North America, South America, and Europe. Playcrypt derives its name from adding the .play extension to encrypted files and has overlap with tactics and tools associated with Hive and Nokoyawa ransomware and infrastructure associated with Quantum ransomware.[1][2][3]

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

How security teams should use this page

Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.

ATT&CK relationship table

Techniques used

This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.

3 rows
DomainIDNameRelationship / procedure
EnterpriseT1486Data Encrypted for Impact

Playcrypt encrypts files on targeted hosts with an AES-RSA hybrid encryption, encrypting every other file portion of 0x100000 bytes.[2][3]

EnterpriseT1490Inhibit System Recovery

Playcrypt can use AlphaVSS to delete shadow copies.[3]

EnterpriseT1083File and Directory Discovery

Playcrypt can avoid encrypting files with a .PLAY, .exe, .msi, .dll, .lnk, or .sys file extension.[3]

Associated objects

Groups, software, and campaigns

GroupEnterprise

G1040: Play

Play is a ransomware group that has been active since at least 2022 deploying Playcrypt ransomware against the business, government, critical infrastructure, healthcare, and media sectors in North America, South America, and Europe. Play actors employ a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after exfiltrating data, and are presumed by security researchers to operate as a closed group.[1][2]

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

Change history

Object version and sync metadata

The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.

ATT&CK release
19.2
Object version
1.0
Created
Modified
Raw hash
b1d505f987606d70...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
ReleaseBundle importedObject versionModifiedStatusRaw hash
19.21.0Current bundleb1d505f98760…
19.11.0Older bundleb1d505f98760…
Raw source

Mirrored ATT&CK source object

The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.

Source references

External references and citations

MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.

  1. [1]
    Microsoft PlayCrypt August 2022

    Microsoft Security Intelligence. (2022, August 27). Ransom:Win32/PlayCrypt.PA. Retrieved September 24, 2024.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    CISA Play Ransomware Advisory December 2023

    CISA. (2023, December 18). #StopRansomware: Play Ransomware AA23-352A. Retrieved September 24, 2024.

    Open source URL
  3. [3]
    Trend Micro Ransomware Spotlight Play July 2023

    Trend Micro Research. (2023, July 21). Ransomware Spotlight: Play. Retrieved September 24, 2024.

    Open source URL
  4. [4]
    Play

    (Citation: CISA Play Ransomware Advisory December 2023)(Citation: Trend Micro Ransomware Spotlight Play July 2023)

  5. [5]
    mitre-attackS1162
    Open source URL
Source and licensing

Source: MITRE ATT&CK®. © 2026 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Glexia is not affiliated with or endorsed by MITRE.