Cybersecurity Teams Worked Together Sunday, July 4 to Stop the Single Biggest Ransomware Attack on Record
NET is an unknown cybercrime group that has defaced 17 countries on the list of defaced nations. The group has been defacing countries in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. The ransomware is said to have started in May as a small group of cybercriminals defaced the Microsoft software maker.
The ransomware is described in a report by Sophos which also suggests it uses Bitcoin to generate revenue.
The defacement appears to be a distributed denial of service (Ddos) attack against targets such as financial institutions, government agencies, media, hospitals, and companies which are not protected by a firewall.
“It’s basically an attack like we’ve got across the oceans,” said one of the researchers, Matthew Green, a director at the Defense Security Forum, an organization established by the Department of Defense to promote military science and technology. “You don’t normally see this kind of thing.
One of the defacement attackers is the group behind the cybercrime group known as the WannaCry group, which had the largest worldwide DDoS attack in the history of 2017. The attack was orchestrated by the group behind the ransomware known as Zeta that also defaced a number of organizations, including government agencies. A few other cybercriminals were responsible for other ransomware attacks that defaced victims in the first couple months after the WannaCry. The ransomware attack on WannaCry was larger than the other attack, and it defaced more targets, including hospitals and companies.
Cybersecurity teams worked together Sunday, July 4 to stop the single biggest global ransomware attack on record.
Article Title: Cybersecurity teams worked together Sunday, July 4 to stop the single biggest global ransomware attack on record | Software. Full Article Text: Software. This week’s theme: From ransomware to information safety. Download the original story here.
The last 12 months have been a time where hackers have been making good use of the security vulnerabilities in the most popular software on the market. The first such attack occurred about a year ago, causing a massive data breach that forced Facebook to temporarily disable accounts for a month and affected millions of users.
Then, in October, the hackers used a bug in Microsoft’s Word 2010 and Excel 2003 to take over the encryption software and shut down access to files on infected computers.
Earlier this month, the FBI, among other federal agencies, reported a new cyberattack on the Office of Personnel Management, the most-used government computer application. An attacker using “a sophisticated and targeted method of attack” was able to take over a control system and commandeer the personal information of nearly 645,000 individuals, according to data collected by the FBI.
A year ago the FBI’s data breach was estimated to affect 6 percent of all records for federal agencies. Now only 15 percent of federal workers and contractors have been affected, a drop of about 10 percent over the course of last year. The remaining 85 percent of employees who use the government’s computers have not sustained a substantial damage from the attacks, the FBI says.
The FBI’s most recent report, the first in a regular quarterly update to the agency’s vulnerability assessment, shows that the attack is on a scale that has not been seen before. It found that the scale is so big that an attack that caused the equivalent of $2 to $3 in damage would cost the agency about 60 million dollars in losses to its networks.
“We have not seen anything like it in 15 years,” said Robert Brewer, the director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “You’re talking about a major incident here that is really a national security issue.
Since the first attack, the FBI has improved its assessment of cyberattacks. Analysts working on the vulnerability assessment were joined by the heads of the Bureau’s Center for Information Assurance, which analyzes vulnerabilities and helps protect the nation’s information systems, and the Cybersecurity Division, which has also become a hub for information sharing and an important source of information for law enforcement.
The detection of the REvil Attack on the Fourth of July.
Article Title: The detection of the REvil Attack on the Fourth of July | Software. Full Article Text: REvil was a successful, state-run malware that was capable of infecting hundreds of thousands of computers. Since the first versions of REvil were detected in 2004 and the first infected computers were reported in late 2010, the malware has become more widespread and more sophisticated over time. Although the software was detected and remediated by almost all of the security teams that the malware was downloaded from, and the initial response was swift and effective, new strains of malware and new variants became successful over time. In response to the threat, the federal government began to take measures to better protect the federal government computers, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U. Department of Defense launched a Joint Research Institute (JRI) to conduct research and provide recommendations to improve the risk detection, remediation, and response capabilities of the government. A research team led by Dr. Joshua Schak, from NIST and Dr. Cohen from the U. Department of Homeland Security, and the U. Department of Defense were tasked with determining the threat characteristics and strategies used by REvil to execute its malicious activities over time.
In a recent research paper, Schak and Cohen describe their work and share lessons learned that helped to detect the REvil threat over time. They report that the software had been downloaded from multiple, remote sources for at least the first half of 2010, and from at least 40 different countries in the first half of 2012. The researchers have also detected a few other malware families that are similar to REvil’s, including Dridex and Garthek.
The REvil malware includes multiple malicious “services” that are deployed upon a computer to perform activities that range from stealing files, launching trojans, spamming, email spammers, and phishing to hijacking a user’s bank account, stealing the user’s identity, sending money, and infecting other computers. Over time, however, the malware has become more sophisticated and has modified its code to be able to target more than one computer.
While the researchers identified the REvil malware’s activities through the use of a technique called “reinforcement learning,” it is possible that a completely new virus is developed and can infect computers at any time.
The Kaseya attack is not Kremlin-directed.
Article Title: The Kaseya attack is not Kremlin-directed | Software.
and possibly other countries in Europe.
distribution.
director of engineering.
Military Intelligence Directorate.
Defense of the Russian Federation.
operations, according to Gowdiak.
Gowdiak says.
Related Posts:
Spread the loveNET is an unknown cybercrime group that has defaced 17 countries on the list of defaced nations. The group has been defacing countries in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. The ransomware is said to have started in May as a small group of cybercriminals defaced the…