Something New to Cring About

New Cring and a Ransomware Record, 

Acer Ransom Doubles to $100,000,000.00

By Dominic Alvieri

April 9th, 2021

DoppelPaymer, Egregor, REvil and Ryuk

The deadline has come and gone and with it a cool $50 Million more. 2021 has started off where 2020 left off with a new ransomware record. Acer,  Shell, T-Mobile, US Cellular and Molson Coors have all also been targets of ransomware this year. 

REvil holds the current record request...for now.

Ransomware targets in 2021.

Phishing is still the number one entry for malware.

Email phishing is still the number one entry point for ransomware and industry reports 90% of all malware access is initially placed by gaining access to corporate networks is through phishing. Antivirus is no longer enough to protect your network. 

Blacklist the items? Reactive management won't suffice. How can you blacklist the unknown?

The whitelist is the target. Corporate mailing lists, executives, vendors, invoices...

Visit CISA.gov for more on how to reduce the risk of ransomware.

Caution Over Cring 

Great security research from Kaspersky this weekend of a new strain of malware called Cring first spotted in the wild in January of this year. Cring targets unpatched vulnerable Fortigate VPN servers. Encrypting the servers to initially gain access. Patching delays have caught cybersecurity teams off guard for which there is no excuse. Updates have been available. 

The Cring attack continues after initial entry has been gained and an application was used to further gain credentialed access to other accounts and deployed Cobalt Strike and finished off the attack by employing PowerShell scripts on the encrypted compromised Fortigate VPN servers. This is an advanced attack and caution should be taken. Update immediately. 

100,000,000 million reasons to worry.

Update and Patch

The ransomware payment of choice is still Bitcoin and with the ever rising cryptocurrency the future is bright for ransomware gangs and dim for poorly managed cybersecurity teams.

One letter can make all of the difference. 

The spoof of the week

 

Spoofs come from all over the world like this one I received from Morocco. The site above would be the correct domain from a request from this university. One letter does make all of the difference. That is basically the essence of cybersecurity. One letter, one packet, one file changes everything.

The 2021 cyber attack onslaught shows no signs of slowing down and Covid is still around. 

Stay vigilant, patched and safe online and off.

Did I mention to patch?

The CyberSecurity Show

by Dominic Alvieri

Twitter @AlvieriD