Malware

The incident is the latest in what appears to be another ransomware wave against health care organizations, after a previous onslaught of attacks and EHR outages in the fall of 2020.

One of the group’s most notable incidents took place earlier this year when they attempted to extort major companies like Shell, Qualys, Jones Day, Flagstar and others who utilized the Accellion file transfer system.

Tangible impacts to corporate earnings, combined with the multi-million dollar ransom payouts by Colonial Pipeline and JBS, demonstrate a reality that more and more in the cybersecurity community are beginning to acknowledge: Ransomware is emerging as a cost of doing business, grabbing the attention not just of security leaders, but the entire C-suite, boards, and even Wall Street investors.

Sourced via open port scanning, map data serves as a reminder for companies to ensure that their security perimeters are secured.

Kurtis Minder, CEO of threat intelligence firm GroupSense, has received a lot of press as a top negotiator in ransomware cases. But he'd rather you not hire him to negotiate. Instead, he says, he'd much rather you stop the ransomware attack before you'd ever need to call him in.

Sol Oriens' work around nuclear weapons raises concerns about the implications of a ransomware attack, though most experts still believe the motivations are financial.

Today’s columnist, Louis Evans of Arctic Wolf, says ransomware gets the headlines, but the Verizon DBIR study points out that security teams still need to lookout for business email compromises. A major BEC by the Russian group RedCurl last summer hit 14 companies in six countries, including construction companies, financial firms, retailers, insurance businesses, law firms, and travel.