According to the Treasury, ransomware is defined as “a form of malicious software (“malware”) designed to block access to a computer system or data, often by encrypting data or programs on information technology (IT) systems to extort ransom payments from victims in exchange for decrypting the information and restoring victims’ access to their systems or data. In some cases, in addition to the attack, the perpetrators threaten to publish sensitive files belonging to the victims, which can be individuals or business entities.”
This pandemic has increased the number of cyber-threat attacks, resulting in the need of cyber-securities. Many governments are appointing advisors to help the business and individuals understand & be aware of ransomware attacks. Now it’s more complicated for the businesses to initiate steps for precautions against being targeted by any attacks.
This blog will give you the latest 2020 ransomware threats report from CrowStrike in order to create awareness about the threats.
Meaning of the advisories
Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) & Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) are the two companies that has released the advisories.
- The FinCEN advisory states about how to use its system of finance to deal with the payments to prevent any attack, flourish information about intermediaries of finance in the payment process, trends of ransomware, red flags for finance, reporting-sharing knowledge about attacks.
Intermediaries aids in smoothening exchange of finance, shielding all the attacks by the detection of fraudulent. They look for any suspicious activities and report it. The company FinCEN has listed 10 red flags for these finance-intermediaries for combining algorithms to help businesses identify threats.
- The OFAC advisory states the potential of risky payments. Its purpose is of highlighting the risks related to financial payments. Despite the threats, when businesses are under target cyber criminals, they are responsible for & subjected to the exposure of OFAC due to the funds transfer between the criminals and the business.
Why it is needed?
Since the last few months and years the attacks of ransomware is increasing in the different sectors. Recently the universal health services were attacked which signifies that no business is safe. In accordance to CrowdStrike’s 2020 Threat Report, the present running year has transformed into a cybercrime world preying on different sectors like hospitality, health, institutions, government, private sectors. It’s happening due to the weak security control of data & no ample of backups.
New techniques of ransomware attack
According to the report of CrowdStrike, we get to see way new techniques of ransomware attacks.
- Attempt for removing security software.
Now the criminals are looking to escape the security software like endpoint security, SIEM by putting an end to it. The efficacy of this purpose can be accomplished by using processhacker, PChunter, defender control etc.which are publicly available.
- Wondering on compromised sites hosting CMS
According to the reports of Crowdstrike, its seen that the criminals are wondering on the compromised websites to supply malwares, phishing pages that are hosting contents from individuals.
- Dropper document developing.
The dropper documents naming leo, Gemini were developed (2019) to disperse several malwares from one document to steal the valuable informations from your device.
- Hijacking of Email thread
This recent type of cybercrime utilize the content of the email that is gathered earlier by Emotet’s email harvester module. After stealing the content of a victim, the malware recognize the email thread by the subject line then a reply is drawn accordingly. The strategy rises the chances of opening by the recipient. It’ll lead to an suspicious attachment and the subject line matches a previous conversation thread that they had with that person.
How businesses can prevent ransomware attack?
Points mentioned beneath are CrowdStrike’s top tips for protecting the organization.
- Implementation of awareness program: The end-user is a constant key link in the series to cease breaches. The business must start awareness programs to fight against the ransomware attacks.
- Hiring professionals for security: Guarding against any attack needs mature procedures & effectiveness & devoted professionals for security purpose. In case if your business can’t afford professional internally then check out to outsource anywhere possible.
- Security control configuration & deploying across business environment: When the security is strict and defending against any cyber-attacks then there is always an accomplishment of intrusions but due to any limitation in configuration by the business can lead to its failure.
- Set up the two-factor authentication: Cyber-criminals are proficient in accessing and usage of valid documents to lead to intense compromise. The users must set up two-factor authentication to make it extremely difficult for criminals to leverage privileged access to accomplish their purposes. However, this doesn’t gives an entire solution for protecting the identities so look out for robust privilege access management process to decease the damage.
How Rescueit can help you out?
Ransomware attacks can create a huge catastrophic effect on you and your business.It results in the extortion for money impacting the entire reputation, downtime.
Rescueit has developed a set of advanced, updated, proprietary tools for retrieving your valuable data from any kind of encryption made by ransomwares, despite of it being complex or unique. But still there is no full guarantee, so we give free business consultation to identify the best solution possible.
