Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Since April 2024, Arctic Wolf has been tracking an ongoing campaign by Black Basta ransomware group affiliates leveraging Microsoft’s Quick Assist for initial access. The Black Basta affiliates have been conducting vishing (voice phishing) attacks by impersonating IT or help desk personnel, claiming they need to fix an issue on the victim’s device. In other instances, the threat actors leverage an email bomb attack to flood the victim’s mailbox with emails from subscription services.

Cybersecurity compliance is complicated. As industry standards change and evolve with new technology, so do compliance requirements. Depending on your organization’s operations, industry, or even location, compliance could mean adhering to multiple frameworks and reporting to multiple governing bodies. In fact, 67% of organizations surveyed by Arctic Wolf follow between one to three sets of guidelines.

While often considered a newer threat, and rightly so given its fast-rising dominance among the cybercrime landscape, ransomware is not a recent innovation in the ongoing cyber war. It stretches back decades to the early days of the internet, email, and even floppy discs.

On May 31st, 2024, a Proof of Concept (PoC) exploit and technical analysis were published for a pre-authentication Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit chain impacting Telerik Report Server, a product by Progress designed for streamlined report management within organizations.

On May 2, 2024, Arctic Wolf Labs began monitoring deployment of a new ransomware variant referred to as Fog. The ransomware activity was observed in several Arctic Wolf Incident Response cases, each exhibiting similar elements. All victim organizations were located in the United States, 80% of which were in the education sector and 20% in the recreation sector. We are sharing details of this emerging variant to help organizations defend against this threat.