Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even when they have done nearly everything right from a data backup perspective.
Cyber threats are evolving every day, keeping up with them is a full-time job. The WESTprotect Cyber News is your source for how these changes affect you in the real estate, title, mortgage, and settlement services industry. From cyber threats to new Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP’s) we’ve got you covered.
Cloudstar still has no “definitive restoration timeline” for its cloud-hosting systems that were taken out by a ransomware attack on July 16. It also said “it is too early to speculate about what data may have been impacted” or information breached, according to a July 19 post on its website. The company hired third-party forensics experts Tetra Defense to help in recovery efforts and contacted law enforcement. “Negotiations with the threat actor are ongoing,” the company posted.
Ransomware has arrived in the title and escrow industry in a big way. One of the title industry’s main cloud-hosting providers (Cloudstar) has been sidelined by a ransomware attack, the company confirmed in an email to The Title Report.
Google has released Chrome 91.0.4472.164 for Windows, Mac, and Linux to fix seven security vulnerabilities, one of them a high severity zero-day vulnerability exploited in the wild. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-30563 exists in the wild," the company revealed. The new Chrome release has started rolling out worldwide to the Stable desktop channel and will become available to all users over the following days.
Google security researchers shared more information on four security vulnerabilities, also known as zero-days, unknown before they discovered them being exploited in the wild earlier this year. The four security flaws were found by Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Google Project Zero researchers after spotting exploits abusing zero-day in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and WebKit, the engine used by Apple's Safari web browser.