Ransomware

The past year brought on or exacerbated several trends in IT security facing the U.S. financial industry. Going into the third year of this pandemic, the same cyberthreats are expected to continue and potentially escalate as adversaries are "waging war on the U.S.," according to researchers from Aite-Novarica Group.

It's too soon to determine whether Russia's crackdown on cybercriminals means its days of sheltering groups are over, experts say.

Russia's federal bank, the Bank of Russia, issued sweeping recommendations to restrict the local cryptocurrency ecosystem. With a substantial portion of the cybercriminal economy operating out of Russia, using cryptocurrency to transfer wealth, an unintended side effect of such laws may be to eliminate some of the comfort ransomware gangs have found in the region.

This week’s breach roundup is led by Memorial Health System’s confirmation that patient data was possibly stolen during a ransomware attack that led to care disruptions in August.

ECRI’s annual top 10 health technology hazards list continues the ongoing push to inform healthcare entities of patient safety risks posed by cyberattacks and other cyber-disruptions.

The new malware, which is designed to mimic the appearance of ransomware but includes no mechanism for ransom recovery, has not been tied to any currently tracked APT group or nation, but was found in “dozens” of Ukrainian systems across the government, non-profit and information technology sectors.

On Monday, law enforcement agencies in ten nations, including the FBI in the United States, shut down a 15-server VPN service used to anonymize ransomware attacks.

The arrests of REvil members are viewed as "significant" and have all but wiped out the group's remaining IT infrastructure, but they're also likely part of a broader conversation happening between Russia and the United States over Ukraine, a potential Russian invasion and the threat of sanctions.

The settlement with the 9.2 million individuals whose data was stolen during a longstanding undetected hack on the vendor included denial by liability by Accellion, which maintains that the company held no legal duty of care to individuals, and that customers were responsible for managing their own software instances – despite security flaws in the product.