
If an adversary can continue to earn from a single target over time, versus a one-time ransom payout, there is the chance for longer term gains. Furthermore, ransomware tends to be a one-time payout per compromised target. In the past, this type of visibility has led to the downfall of many criminal organizations. An attack like this potentially impacts critical infrastructure and involves the participation of law enforcement, as the CDOT attack involved both the FBI and Colorado National Guard.
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Recently, the Colorado Department of Transportation was forced to take 2,000 endpoints offline when the SamSam variant of ransomware hit their system. Ransomware gets the attention of popular media because it is so disruptive. Ransomware’s high visibility could lead to its downfall. My hypothesis for a spike in cryptomining is based on three points: 1. I am not hypothesizing that ransomware is going away, but that miners will become a more frequently observed payload. This trend leads me to believe that the focus of financially motivated adversaries and botnets will move away from ransomware as the primary payload.

Even highly public breaches like that of the Tesla systems resulted in the delivery of a miner as the final payload. These observations are both directly from attacks my team has observed in the wild, as well as research by other security teams. I have seen a notable uptick in cryptocurrency miners being delivered via various attack techniques, to various targets. Based on recent observations, I believe the new trend to watch for could be cryptocurrency. Threat trends and methods to “make a quick buck” will continue, while new methodologies rise to the forefront. These attacks are highly destructive and largely driven by financial gain. This last year you couldn’t turn on the TV, look at social media, or visit your favorite internet news source without being faced with another story of a ransomware compromise. Minimize downtime with after-hours support.Train continuously for real world situations.Operationalize your Microsoft security stack.Protect critical production Linux and Kubernetes.Protect your users’ email, identities, and SaaS apps.Protect your corporate endpoints and network.
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The Birmingham suburb’s Deputy Mayor David Miller has confirmed the incident and said that the incident is being investigated by the law enforcement and he has been prohibited from commenting further until the investigation gets full probed. A source from Daily Mail suggests that Leeds was hit with a ransomware attack last week, which forced the Birmingham suburb to pay hackers $12,000 in bitcoins to gain back access to the encrypted systems. Meanwhile, reports are pouring in for a separate incident related to the city of Leeds ransomware attack. Means, the previous ransomware infection appears to be transformed into a new malware which has locked the files from access.

Now, all those systems which remained infected with SamSam ransomware are showing signs of being infected by a new malware. The officials of the transport department did not wish to bow to the ransomware authors and instead chose to use backup systems for data recovery. On Feb 21st last month, the agency was struck with SamSam Ransomware taking down over 2,000 computer systems offline. Simmons added that the tools the department has in place didn’t work in nullifying the malware as it is way ahead of the present technology.
