Ransomware encrypts or steals data to disrupt operations and extort victims, making backups, access controls, and incident response essential.
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Background for this topic.
Ransomware is malware used to deny access to systems or data, usually by encrypting files and demanding payment for decryption. Many operations also steal sensitive information and threaten to publish it, so an attack can create both an availability crisis and a privacy or disclosure risk. Initial access may involve phishing, stolen credentials, exposed remote services, or exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities; attackers may then move through the network before deploying the payload.
Defenses should combine vulnerability management, phishing-resistant authentication where practical, endpoint and network monitoring, and backups that are isolated from routine administrator access and regularly tested for recovery. Organizations should also limit privileges and segment critical systems to reduce the blast radius. An incident requires rapid containment, preservation of forensic evidence, restoration from known-good backups, and assessment of notification, legal, and regulatory obligations. Threat intelligence can help identify relevant criminal infrastructure or tactics, but it does not replace sound access control, patching, detection, and recovery practices.
A recently discovered ransomware strain called HybridPetya can bypass the UEFI Secure Boot feature to install a malicious application on the EFI System Partition. [...]
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting the agency to investigate Microsoft for failing to provide adequate security in its products, which led to ransomware attacks against healthcare organizations. [...]
Panama's Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) has disclosed that one of its computers may have been compromised in a cyberattack.. [...]
The Akira ransomware gang is actively exploiting CVE-2024-40766, a year-old critical-severity access control vulnerability, to gain unauthorized access to SonicWall devices. [...]
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Ukrainian national Volodymyr Viktorovich Tymoshchuk for his role as the administrator of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ransomware operations. [...]
American furniture brand Lovesac is warning that it suffered a data breach impacting an undisclosed number of individuals, stating their personal data was exposed in a cybersecurity incident. [...]