Thursday 1 October 2020

Cyber Security Roundup for October 2020

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, September 2020.

COVID-19 wasn't the only virus seriously disrupting the start of the new UK academic year, with ransomware plaguing a number of University and Colleges in September.  Newcastle University was reportedly hit by the 'DoppelPaymer' crime group, a group known for deploying malware to attack their victims, and behind leaking online documents from Elon Musk's SpaceX and Tesla companies. The northeast university reported a personal data breach to the UK Information Commissioner's Office after its stolen files were posted online, along with a Twitter threat to release further confidential student and staff data if a ransom payment was not paid. In a statement, the university said "it will take several weeks" to address the issues, and that many IT services will not be operating during this period", that statement is the hallmark of recovery from a mass ransomware infection.

Doppelpaymer Ransom notice

On the back of the Newcastle University cyberattack, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a warning to all British universities and colleges about a spike in ransomware attacks targeting the British educational sector. NCSC's director of operations Paul Chichester said the agency had seen an increase in the "utterly reprehensible" attacks over the past 18 months and was concerned they would disrupt young people's education.  The NCSC's guidance for organisations on defending against ransomware attacks is available here.

Across the pond, healthcare giant Universal Heather Services (UHS), which operates nearly 400 hospitals and clinics, was said to be severely disrupted by the Ryuk ransomware. According to Bleeping Computer, a UHS employee said encrypted files had the telltale .ryk extension, while another employee described a ransom note fitted the Ryuk ransomware demand note. A Reddit thread claimed “All UHS hospitals nationwide in the US currently have no access to phones, computer systems, internet, or the data center. Ambulances are being rerouted to other hospitals, the information needed to treat patients – health records, lab works, cardiology reports, medications records, etc. – is either temporarily unavailable or received with delay, affecting patient treatment. Four people died tonight alone due to the waiting on results from the lab to see what was going on”. In response, UHS released a statement which said, “We implement extensive IT security protocols and are working diligently with our IT security partners to restore IT operations as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our facilities are using their established back-up processes including offline documentation methods".

'Dark Overlord', the handle of a British hacker involved in the theft of information as part of "The Overlord" hacking group was jailed for five years in the United States and ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution, after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit aggravated identity theft and computer fraud, in other words, orchestrating cyber exportation attacks against US firms.


ZeroLogon:  IT Support Staff must Patch Now!
A critical Microsoft Windows Server Domain Controller vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) is now causing concern for IT staff, after the Microsoft, CISA, the UK NCSC, and other security bodies warned the vulnerability was being actively exploited in mid-September. Dubbed 'Zerologon', Microsoft issued a security fix for the bug, which scored a maximum criticality rate of 10.0, as part of their August 2020 'Patch Tuesday' release of monthly security updates. Since that public disclosure of the flaw, there have been multiple proofs-of-concept (PoC) exploits appearing on the internet, which threat actors are now adapting into their cyberattacks. There are no mitigation or workarounds for this vulnerability, so it is essential for the CVE-2020-1472 security update is installed on all Microsoft Windows Domain Controllers, and then ensure DC enforcement mode is enabled. 

Stay safe and secure.

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