Cyber News

The FBI and CISA urged organizations not to let down their defenses against ransomware attacks during weekends or holidays in a joint cybersecurity advisory issued earlier today. The two federal agencies said they "observed an increase in highly impactful ransomware attacks occurring on holidays and weekends—when offices are normally closed—in the United States, as recently as the Fourth of July holiday in 2021."

A former remote employee of NY Credit Union was able to access the shared servers using her old credentials which were not removed and delete roughly about 21GB of data from the shared drives as revenge for being fired. WESTprotect recommends that you remove any credentials that are no longer required as soon as possible.

The LockBit 2.0 ransomware gang is actively recruiting corporate insiders to help them breach and encrypt networks. In return, the insider is promised million-dollar payouts. Many ransomware gangs operate as a Ransomware-as-a-Service, which consists of a core group of developers, who maintain the ransomware and payment sites, and recruited affiliates who breach victims' networks and encrypt devices.

The No More Ransom project celebrates its fifth anniversary today after helping over six million ransomware victims recover their files and saving them almost €1 billion in ransomware payments. No More Ransom is an online portal launched in July 2016 and a public-private partnership created by law enforcement and industry leaders (Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands’ police, McAfee, and Kaspersky).

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.