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The surge in ransomware attacks on cities, municipalities, schools, and healthcare organizations this year is just a foretaste of what is likely come in 2020.
Threat actors have sensed a very real opportunity to make big returns attacking enterprise organizations using ransomware and are refining their tools and techniques to increase their chances for success, say worried security experts.
Some recent developments include growing collaboration between threat groups on ransomware campaigns; the use of more sophisticated evasion mechanisms; elaborate multi-phase attacks involving reconnaissance and network scoping; and human-guided automated attack techniques.
IT and security groups that are already under pressure to respond will be challenged even more by the growing sophistication of the ransomware threat, experts note. While municipal governments, schools, and other perceived “soft” targets will continue to bear the brunt of the attacks, no organization will really be safe.
“We would assume that the larger and more important an organization is, the more attractive a target it poses for extortionists,” says Fedor Sinitsyn, senior malware analyst at Kaspersky. But “any company or organization should be aware of [the] threat and plan accordingly,” he notes.
With the current reliance on digital infrastructure, any network disruption equals loss of money. Taking into account the disastrous effects of ransomware, the recovery period for some organizations could end up being long and painful, Sinitsyn says.
Going From Bad to Worse
2019 turned out to be a far more active year for ransomware than many might have anticipated given the declining overall volume in attacks last year.
Emsisoft recently estimated that ransomware attacks have cost US government agencies, educational establishments, and healthcare providers alone more than $7.5 billion this year. According to the security vendor, up to December 2019, at least 759 healthcare providers, 103 state and municipal governments and agencies, and 86 universities, colleges, and school districts have been hit in ransomware attacks.
In addition to financial losses the attacks have resulted in emergency patients being redirected to other hospitals, medical records being lost, property transactions being halted, surveillance systems going offline, and other very real-world consequences, Emsisoft said.
Several developments suggest that the situation in 2020 is likely going to be at least as bad, if not actually worse.
One troubling trend is the growth in instances of threat groups collaborating with each other to enable easier delivery of malware. Security firm SentinelOne recently reported on how the operators of the TrickBot banking Trojan have begun selling access to networks it has previously compromised to other threat groups including those seeking to distribute ransomware.
Such collaboration is allowing threat groups to distribute ransomware more easily without having to do any initial breaching of a network on their own.
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Carl Wearn, head of e-crime at Mimecast, describes the advent of collaboration across criminal groups with differing specialties as one of the most significant ransomware developments in 2019. “Malware threat actors are increasingly trading their work,” he says. “This leads to hackers selling access to already compromised networks.”
The highly targeted use of ransomware via precursor infections to ascertain a suitable ransom payment is another big issue, Wearn says.
In many attacks, threat actors have first infected a target network with malware like Emotet and Trickbot to try and gather as much information about systems on the network as possible. The goal is to find the high-value systems and encrypt data on it so victims are more likely to pay.
“If we look at the big picture, we will discover that what is changing is the threat actors’ approach to distributing the Trojans and selecting their victims,” Sinitsyn says. If five years ago almost all ransomware was mass-scale and the main distribution vector was via spam, nowadays many criminals are using targeted attacks instead.
“Threat actors carry out a reconnaissance in order to find a large corporation or a governmental entity or a municipal network and try to breach their defenses,” Sinitsyn says. Since the criminals know with whom they are dealing, they tend to set the ransom amount significantly high.
Another trend to note is the increase in incidents where criminals not only encrypt the victim’s data, but also exfiltrate some of it during the infection, Sinitsyn says. It gives the threat actors additional leverage for extorting money. “In case the victim is reluctant to pay up — [because] for example, they have consistent backups offsite — the criminals will threaten to release some of the stolen data into public,” he adds. One example of ranomware being used in this way is Maze, a tool that some believe was used in a recent attack on Pensacola, where threat actors are demanding a $1 milion ransom.
Growing Malware Sophistication…
