On July 23, Garmin users went to Twitter to express their concern over inaccessible website features. Four days later, Garmin released an official statement confirming that a cyber attack had taken pl…
Posts tagged "Ransomware"
Incident Of The Week: Alabama Hit By 2nd Ransomware Attack In As Many Months
Alabama’s Chilton County employees notified the local IT team that their computers were running sluggish and some of the applications looked different. In an effort to shut down a suspected ransomware…
Incident Of The Week: Maze Ransomware Targets Conduent And Aerospace Entity In U…
The IT services enterprise, Conduent, which provides HR and payment infrastructure to “a majority of Fortune 100 companies and over 500 governments,” was hit by a Maze ransomware attack on May 29, 202…
Incident Of The Week: Finastra’s Ransomware Attack
Finastra reported that it detected a ransomware attack on its servers, last Friday. The company followed by acknowledging it had detected ransomware activity – but that customer and employee data rema…
The Cost Of An Enterprise Ransomware Attack
Ransomware attacks are occurring more frequently and the outcomes are having greater impact on organizations than ever before. Little empirical data is available, however, about the outcomes of these…
FBI: Over $140 million handed over to ransomware attackers
By analyzing bitcoin wallets and ransom notes, the FBI has determined that cybercrime victims paid over $ 140m to ransomware operators over the past six years.
At this year's RSA security conference, FBI Special Agent Joel DeCapua presented in his findings during two sessions in which he explained how he was able to use bitcoin wallets and ransom notes collected by the FBI, shared by private partners or found on VirusTotal to figure out how much victims paid in ransom payments.
According to DeCapua, between October 2013 and November 2019, approximately $ 144,350,000 was paid in bitcoins to ransomware actors. However, this figure does not include operation costs related to these attacks but just the ransom payments that were made.
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When it came to the most profitable ransomware families, Ryuk brought in the most money for ransomware operators at $ 61.26m followed by Crysis/Dharma at $ 24.48m and Bitpaymer at $ 8.04m. It's worth noting that the actual amount of payments made over these six years is likely much higher as the FBI does not have access to all of the data surrounding ransomware attacks, as many businesses keep them secret to prevent hurting their stock prices.
Defending against ransomware
During his sessions at RSA, DeCapua also provided some tips on how companies and individuals can avoid falling victim to ransomware attacks.
DeCapua revealed that the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is the most common method that ransomware attackers are able to gain access to a network before deploying ransomware. In fact, RDP accounts for 70-80 percent of network breaches which is why he recommends that organizations use Network Level Authentication (NLA) for additional protection.
With NLA, clients are required to authenticate themselves with the network before they can actually connect to the remote desktop server. This provides increased security against preauthentication exploits though, DeCapua also suggested that unique and complex passwords should be used for RDP accounts.
Additionally, DeCapua suggests that businesses and individuals be careful of phishing attacks, install software and operating system updates, use complex passwords, monitor their networks and have a contingency plan with backups to prevent falling victim to a ransomware attack.
- We've also highlighted the best antivirus software
Via BleepingComputer
Incident Of The Week: Ransomware Hits Currency Dealer Travelex
A New Year’s Eve ransomware attack on currency dealer and forex services provider Travelex impacted customers and financial partners. The cyber-attack is the latest along with the City of New Orleans…