Over the last week, more than a thousand companies, many of them small businesses, were dealing with the fallout from the Kaseya mass ransomware incident. In the wake of the devastating compromise of Kaseya’s popular IT management tool, researchers and security professionals are warning that the debacle isn’t a one-off event but part of a larger trend. Hackers are increasingly targeting the entire class of tools that administrators...

Complaint Alleged Multiple Security ‘Failures’ Leading to 2020 Cyberattack A federal court has approved a proposed settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed in February against Nebraska Medicine. This is in the wake of a 2020 malware attack and exfiltration of sensitive personal data and medical records of tens of thousands of individuals. The costs of the proposed settlement could exceed $37 million in patient reimbursements.  Out...

Criminals targeting business people with malware-laden documents SolarMarker backdoor malware operators are using “SEO poisoning” techniques to deploy the remote access Trojan to steal sensitive information, Microsoft reports. SEO poisoning attacks use PDFs stuffed with links to malware that is used to steal data and credentials from browsers. Attack Analysis In April, cybersecurity firm eSentire found that hackers had flooded the...

Oil pipelines and Apple among most recent targets Seemingly every week, there’s a new disruption caused by ransomware. Some of them are more noteworthy than others, with the recent pipeline disruption getting the most coverage followed by a $50M ransom demanded from Apple a few weeks ago. It’s all part of a trend of escalating criminal activity centered around ransomware. Trends While the high-profile demands and disruptions are generating...

Phishing continues to be one of the most prominent, and damaging, ways that cybercriminals gain access to healthcare networks. It is also one of the most straightforward threats for an organization to deal with. Unlike a number of more technical cybercrimes, phishing can be prevented with simple training. Employees who have received training in spotting and reporting phishing emails dramatically reduce the risk that malware and ransomware will...

159 Major Breaches in 2021 About 70 major health data breaches have been added to the federal tally in the last four weeks as ransomware attacks have persisted and breaches at vendors have affected clients. As of Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website showed 159 breaches affecting a combined total of 12.5 million individuals have been added to the tally so far this year. That’s up...

The Treasury Department’s OCC, Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC are proposing rule changes that would dramatically increase the reporting requirements for banks that experience a “computer security incident”. While the time for public comment has passed and the rule changes are not final yet, here is the sum-mary of what is being proposed. “The OCC, Board, and FDIC (together, the agencies) invite comment on a notice of proposed rule-making...

With people working from home and many companies planning on making some level of remote work permanent, it’s important for banks and other data-heavy industries to reconsider how their network security is implemented. That’s where Zero Trust comes in. Zero Trust has become one of cybersecurity’s latest buzzwords. But it’s not just a buzzword. For industries where security is of paramount importance, it’s imperative to understand what Zero...

A ransomware gang has hit a Seattle-based billing and payment processing provider. This highlights how criminals are both attacking businesses and also stealing and selling valuable personal information, regardless of whether or not the ransom is paid. Gangs are increasingly targeting service businesses with access to customers’ financial information. The ‘Cuba’ ransomware gang has taken credit for the hit against Automatic...

Business Associate Breaches Affect Millions Nearly 1/3 of the major health data breaches added to the federal tally so far this year involve business associates, continuing a trend in recent years. A recent analysis by CI Security found that in the second half of 2020, nearly 75% of all records breached were tied to security incidents involving business associates. Currently, the HHS OCR website shows that 37 major breaches, affecting more than...

  Bureau and Security Experts Warn About Gang’s Effective Extortion Model   The FBI issued a warning this week over the growing threat from the operators behind the Egregor ransomware variant and other cybercriminal gangs affiliated with the group. Since September, the Egregor gang and its affiliates claim to have compromised approximately 150 corporate networks in the U.S. and other countries. In some cases, the extortion...

New Egregor ransomware has been gaining traction since emerging in September. A new form of ransomware is becoming increasingly prolific as cybercriminals turn to it as a preferred means of encrypting vulnerable networks in an effort to exploit bitcoin from victims. Egregor ransomware first emerged in September but has already become notorious following several high-profile incidents, including attacks against Barnes & Noble and video game...

From Ransomware and DDoS to Malware and SIM Swapping: Europol Describes Latest Threats According to the seventh annual Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment, produced by Europol ransomware attacks remain the top cyber-enabled threat. But phishing, business email compromises and other types of fraud – many now using a COVID-19 theme – also loom large. Here are 10 of the top threats from the Europol report in alphabetical order....

Microsoft’s Security Intelligence team is warning users of the Office 365 suite about an ongoing phishing campaign that appears to be harvesting victims’ credentials. The phishing emails, which are currently circulating, use several techniques to bypass and evade secure email gateways. The criminals use social engineering techniques and timely subject lines relevant to remote work, like password updates, conferencing info, and...

Researchers: Hackers May Have Used Magento Zero-Day Exploit In the largest automated hacking campaign since at least 2015, from September 11-14, malicious JavaScript skimming code was injected into nearly 2,000 e-commerce sites that were running an older version of Adobe’s Magento software, possibly resulting in the theft of payment card data. It was the largest automated campaign on record, surpassing a breach in July 2019 that hacked...

Regulator: Georgia Clinic Showed ‘Systemic Noncompliance’ Federal regulators have announced a $1.5 million HIPAA settlement with Athens Orthopedic Clinic in Georgia, stemming from a 2016 breach involving The Dark Overlord hacking group that exposed the records of nearly 209,000 individuals. The exposed PHI included name, date of birth, SSN, patient demographic information, clinical information, and financial/billing information. The...

A newly discovered phishing campaign is spoofing a U.S. Small Business Administration loan offer in an attempt to steal banking credentials and other personal data. This campaign appears to have started in early August. This follows a different phishing attack in April that also used spoofed SBA messages, but unlike the current scam, that one was created to distribute malware. Fake Loan Applications In the phishing campaign, the victims are...

Two recent ransomware incidents targeted companies serving healthcare organizations, highlighting an emerging challenge for vendor risk management in the sector. Blackbaud, which sells cloud-based marketing, fundraising, and customer relationship management software, was recently hit by ransomware. Some of its affected clients are now being revealed. Meanwhile, medical debt collector firm R1 RCM, formerly known as Accretive Health, also has...