Electricity and Control May 2022

CYBERSECURITY

Ransomware reaches new levels

O nce a niche criminal enterprise, ransomware has become big business, complete with R&D departments and sales and marketing divisions. Ransomware today is like a deeply layered onion, with attacks wreaking havoc in large enterpris es in South Africa and around the globe. Patrick Evans, CEO of SLVA Cybersecurity says it takes only two hours to determine whether a network’s endpoint protection can be circumvented and if the organisation has controls in place to stop the encryption and ransomware behaviour. “Understanding an organisation’s current environment, and the likely costs of a ransomware attack, is crucial to making more informed decisions concerning security,” Evans says. The recent ransomware attack on TransUnion has raised concerns among many enterprises about their own potential security vulnerabilities. Irrespective of the amount of protection currently in place, ransomware has evolved into a complex and sophisticated form of organised crime. “Although many people believe the victims of ransomware have not secured their networks, most organisations actually have made significant investments in information and cyber security. Features such as firewalls, endpoint protection, intrusion detection, patch management, and many others are all in place and form part of the organisation’s layered defence,” Evans explains. In addition, large enterprises typically have teams of experts running security operations, governance and compliance programs and more than likely have a CISO playing a critical role as information security executive. “Most businesses today know that the weak link is the human element, which poses a significant risk to the safety of the overall company. Most have run security awareness programmes for well over a decade, to make their employees and contractors aware of the risks they create when clicking on a link in a document or having easily guessable passwords,” he says. Yet, with such extensive measures in place, the question as to how ransomware attacks happen remains. As with any organised crime unit, there is usually a syndicate at work. These syndicates involve experts who know their way around a complex digital world, and it is this complexity, with its multiple layers, that makes it easy for criminals to strike successfully. In a typical IT environment, there are endpoints, servers, mobile devices, networks, multiple applications, cloud, and service providers. Every individual item develops vulnerabilities that attackers can use to gain access to the network, endpoint or server. There are also other vulnerabilities that need to be patched which, in itself, is a complex task. Evans says, “Today, it is virtually impossible to patch everything all the time, so patching needs to be prioritised, based on the likelihood and impact of an attack. This requires intelligence about what is actually happening

and needs to be collated and interpreted, with insights derived in real-time.” Legitimising the business of crime, as with organised crime, now includes ransomware. The organisations are often registered as legitimate businesses. “There is nothing subtle about the businesses; their CEOs conduct TV and radio interviews, and they operate blatantly in countries which have no intention of stopping the activities because they bring in tens of millions of dollars of revenue,” says Evans. He says this new, more organised form of ransomware – or ransomware 3.0 – kicked off in earnest in 2019. It is often referred to as ‘double extortion’ and is characterised by the theft of credentials, intellectual property and data, at the same time threatening public shaming and the organisation’s employees and customers. ”Threats to exfiltrate data if the ransom is not paid are 81% of the norm today, which is a worrying statistic.” In ransomware 3.0, criminals are organised into mission-focused businesses. There are developers of specialist attacks; access brokers who specialise in breaking into organisations and then selling that access; and Ransomware-as-a-Service providers who work with affiliates to identify targets and then share the profit with the affiliates after successful attacks. They even have public relations departments that issue press releases and respond publicly to crises. And they have crypto brokers and money launderers in the supply chain – in essence, a multilevel ecosystem of organised crime. Ransomware 3.0 has also seen distributed denial of service attacks serving as a distraction or obfuscation of an attack, and the deployment of crypto-mining malware in a hybrid form of attack. The way forward, says Evans, is to recognise ransomware as an advanced persistent threat or APT. “Attackers are playing a long game. Targets are tricked into letting an initial piece of malware in. And where an organisation is already a victim of a ransomware attack, attackers know multiple vulnerable entry points and may still have malicious code embedded in that environment masquerading as a benign process. While it may be tempting to believe ransomware attacks are directed at large enterprises because they grab the lion’s share of the headlines, Evans says, “All organisations, from the micro business to the parastatal, in any industry sector, are potential targets. Small to medium sized organisations simply cannot absorb the financial loss following a ransomware attack.” While there is no silver bullet, Evans says there are proven ways to prevent a successful attack. “Efficient cyber security defences, including an effective last line of defence against ransomware, inside a fit-for-purpose budget remains the most sensible starting point.”

Patrick Evans, CEO of SLVA Cybersecurity

For more information visit: https://slva-cs.com

28 Electricity + Control MAY 2022