The Week in Ransomware - December 9th 2022 - Wide Impact
This week has been filled with research reports and news of significant attacks having a wide impact on many organizations. [...]
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.
This week has been filled with research reports and news of significant attacks having a wide impact on many organizations. [...]
Cloud computing provider Rackspace warned customers on Thursday of increased risks of phishing attacks following a ransomware attack affecting its hosted Microsoft Exchange environment. [...]
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new warning today for the country's healthcare organizations regarding ongoing attacks from a relatively new operation, the Royal ransomware gang. [...]
CommonSpirit Health has confirmed that threat actors accessed the personal data for 623,774 patients during an October ransomware attack. [...]
Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace has confirmed today that a ransomware attack is behind its ongoing Hosted Exchange outage. [...]
The André-Mignot teaching hospital in the suburbs of Paris had to shut down its phone and computer systems because of a ransomware attack that hit on Saturday evening. [...]