Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

U.S. President Joe Biden is under pressure to take a stand against a relentless pace of cybersecurity attacks. Russian-speaking hackers have claimed accountability for a recent ransomware assault on IT management software provider Kaseya VSA. The group of Russian threat actors also referred to as the Revil Group, launched a bombshell supply-chain hit during the weekend of July 4th, 2021 against Kaseya VSA and multiple managed service providers.

The industry consensus today is that the only way to reliably end the threat of ransomware for good is to stop paying ransoms. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that they should be banned altogether. But because of a lack of public knowledge and transparency, it’s almost impossible to know the full scale of the problem to understand the right solution.

LockBit Ransomware(a.k.a. ABCD) is yet another ransomware group operating in the RaaS(Ransomware-as-a-Service) model, following the same architecture as other major threat groups, like REvil. This threat emerged in September 2019 and is still being improved by its creators. In June 2021, the LockBit group announced the release of LockBit 2.0, which included a new website hosted on the deep web, as well as a new feature to encrypt Windows domains using group policy.

There’s a saying that nothing can be certain, except death and taxes; in today’s cyber threat landscape, we can add ransomware to that short list. One of the AT&T Managed Threat Detection and Response customers almost had an incident at the crossroads of taxes and ransomware, but thanks to the SentinelOne advanced EDR platform, the attack was quickly detected and stopped automatically.

Most discussions around cybersecurity understandably focus on information technology (IT). Assets like cloud services and data centers are typically what companies spend the most time and effort securing. Recently, though, operational technology (OT) has come under increasing scrutiny from leading security experts in both the private and public sectors. In June, for instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a fact sheet about ransomware attacks on OT.