Headline
Double-Extortion Play Ransomware Strikes 300 Organizations Worldwide
The threat actors behind the Play ransomware are estimated to have impacted approximately 300 entities as of October 2023, according to a new joint cybersecurity advisory from Australia and the U.S. "Play ransomware actors employ a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after exfiltrating data and have impacted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure organizations in North
The threat actors behind the Play ransomware are estimated to have impacted approximately 300 entities as of October 2023, according to a new joint cybersecurity advisory from Australia and the U.S.
“Play ransomware actors employ a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after exfiltrating data and have impacted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure organizations in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia,” authorities said.
Also called Balloonfly and PlayCrypt, Play emerged in 2022, exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers (CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082) and Fortinet appliances (CVE-2018-13379 and CVE-2020-12812) to breach enterprises and deploy file-encrypting malware.
It’s worth pointing out that ransomware attacks are increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities rather than using phishing emails as initial infection vectors, jumping from nearly zero in the second half of 2022 to almost a third in the first half of 2023, per data from Corvus.
UPCOMING WEBINAR
Beat AI-Powered Threats with Zero Trust - Webinar for Security Professionals
Traditional security measures won’t cut it in today’s world. It’s time for Zero Trust Security. Secure your data like never before.
Join Now
Cybersecurity firm Adlumin, in a report published last month, revealed that it’s being offered to other threat actors “as a service,” completing its transformation into a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation.
Ransomware attacks orchestrated by the group are characterized by the use of public and bespoke tools like AdFind to run Active Directory queries, Grixba to enumerate network information, GMER, IOBit, and PowerTool to disable antivirus software, and Grixba for collecting information about backup software and remote administration tools installed on a machine.
The threat actors have also been observed to carry out lateral movement and data exfiltration and encryption steps, banking on Cobalt Strike, SystemBC, and Mimikatz for post-exploitation.
“The Play ransomware group uses a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after exfiltrating data,” the agencies said. “Ransom notes do not include an initial ransom demand or payment instructions, rather, victims are instructed to contact the threat actors via email.”
According to statistics compiled by Malwarebytes, Play is said to have claimed nearly 40 victims in November 2023 alone, but significantly trailing behind its peers LockBit and BlackCat (aka ALPHV and Noberus).
The alert comes days after U.S. government agencies released an updated bulletin about the Karakurt group, which is known to eschew encryption-based attacks in favor of pure extortion after obtaining initial access to networks via purchasing stolen login credentials, intrusion brokers (aka initial access brokers), phishing, and known security flaws.
“Karakurt victims have not reported encryption of compromised machines or files; rather, Karakurt actors have claimed to steal data and threatened to auction it off or release it to the public unless they receive payment of the demanded ransom,” the government said.
The developments also come amid speculations that the BlackCat ransomware may have been a target of a law enforcement operation after its dark web leak portals went offline for five days. However, the e-crime collective pinned the outage on a hardware failure.
What’s more, another nascent ransomware group known as NoEscape is alleged to have pulled an exit scam, effectively “stealing the ransom payments and closing down the group’s web panels and data leak sites,” prompting other gangs like LockBit to recruit their former affiliates.
That the ransomware landscape is constantly evolving and shifting, whether be it due to external pressure from law enforcement, is hardly surprising. This is further evidenced by the collaboration between the BianLian, White Rabbit, and Mario ransomware gangs in a joint extortion campaign targeting publicly traded financial services firms.
“These cooperative ransom campaigns are rare, but are possibly becoming more common due to the involvement of initial access brokers (IABs) collaborating with multiple groups on the dark web,” Resecurity said in a report published last week.
“Another factor that may be leading to greater collaboration are law enforcement interventions that create cybercriminal diaspora networks. Displaced participants of these threat actor networks may be more willing to collaborate with rivals.”
Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.
Related news
Based on a comprehensive review of more than a dozen prominent ransomware groups, we identified several commonalities in TTPs, along with several notable differences and outliers.
Two other vulnerabilities that Microsoft is fixing Tuesday — CVE-2023-36563 in Microsoft WordPad and CVE-2023-41763 in the Skype communication platform — have already been publicly exploited in the wild and have proof-of-concept code available.
Categories: Exploits and vulnerabilities Categories: News Tags: Zoho ManageEngine Tags: CVE-2021-40539 Tags: Log4Shell Tags: CVE-2021-44228 Tags: CVE-2021-13379 Tags: ProxyShell Tags: CVE-2021-34473 Tags: CVE-2021-31207 Tags: CVE-2021-34523 Tags: CVE-2021-26084 Tags: Atlassian Tags: CVE-2022-22954 Tags: CVE-2022-22960 Tags: CVE-2022-26134 Tags: CVE-2022-1388 Tags: CVE-2022-30190 Tags: Follina What can the routinely exploited vulnerabilities of 2022 tell us, and what do we think will make it on to next year's list? (Read more...) The post 2022's most routinely exploited vulnerabilities—history repeats appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.
A four-year-old critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiOS SSL has emerged as one of the most routinely and frequently exploited vulnerabilities in 2022. "In 2022, malicious cyber actors exploited older software vulnerabilities more frequently than recently disclosed vulnerabilities and targeted unpatched, internet-facing systems," cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the Five
Categories: Threat Intelligence Our Threat Intelligence team looks at known ransomware attacks by gang, country, and industry sector in December 2022, and looks at why LockBit had to make a public apology (Read more...) The post Ransomware in December 2022 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.
By Waqas Cybercriminals are leveraging two exploit chains (ProxyNotShell/OWASSRF) to target Microsoft Exchange servers, as warned by Bitdefender Labs. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: New Wave of Cyberattacks Targeting MS Exchange Servers
The first Patch Tuesday fixes shipped by Microsoft for 2023 have addressed a total of 98 security flaws, including one bug that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. 11 of the 98 issues are rated Critical and 87 are rated Important in severity, with the vulnerabilities also listed as publicly known at the time of release. Separately, the Windows maker is expected to release
Organizations often defer patching because of business disruption fears — but that didn't work out very well for Rackspace's Hosted Exchange service.
The hosting provider had not applied Microsoft's new patch due to publicly reported issues with the update.
The Play ransomware group was spotted exploiting another little-known SSRF bug to trigger RCE on affected Exchange servers.
Threat actors affiliated with a ransomware strain known as Play are leveraging a never-before-seen exploit chain that bypasses blocking rules for ProxyNotShell flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server to achieve remote code execution (RCE) through Outlook Web Access (OWA). "The new exploit method bypasses URL rewrite mitigations for the Autodiscover endpoint," CrowdStrike researchers Brian Pitchford,
Threat actors affiliated with a ransomware strain known as Play are leveraging a never-before-seen exploit chain that bypasses blocking rules for ProxyNotShell flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server to achieve remote code execution (RCE) through Outlook Web Access (OWA). "The new exploit method bypasses URL rewrite mitigations for the Autodiscover endpoint," CrowdStrike researchers Brian Pitchford,
Categories: News Categories: Ransomware Tags: Rackspace Tags: Exchange Tags: ransomware Tags: ProxyNotShell Rackspace said a ransomware incident affected its Hosted Exchange environment and caused service disruptions. (Read more...) The post Rackspace confirms it suffered a ransomware attack appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.
The vulnerability, disclosed In October, gives an unauthenticated attacker a way to take control of an affected product.
The vulnerability, disclosed In October, gives an unauthenticated attacker a way to take control of an affected product.
Let's face it: Having “2022 election” in the headline above is probably the only reason anyone might read this story today. Still, while most of us here in the United States are anxiously awaiting the results of how well we've patched our Democracy, it seems fitting that Microsoft Corp. today released gobs of security patches for its ubiquitous Windows operating systems. November's patch batch includes fixes for a whopping six zero-day security vulnerabilities that miscreants and malware are already exploiting in the wild.
Let's face it: Having “2022 election” in the headline above is probably the only reason anyone might read this story today. Still, while most of us here in the United States are anxiously awaiting the results of how well we've patched our Democracy, it seems fitting that Microsoft Corp. today released gobs of security patches for its ubiquitous Windows operating systems. November's patch batch includes fixes for a whopping six zero-day security vulnerabilities that miscreants and malware are already exploiting in the wild.
While the ransomware-for-hire group works to create ever more efficient exploits, companies can protect themselves with structured vulnerability management processes. Prioritize threats based on severity and risk.
The authentication bypass flaw in FortiOS, FortiProxy and FortiSwitchManager is easy to find and exploit, security experts say.
Categories: Exploits and vulnerabilities Categories: News Tags: Microsoft Tags: Apple Tags: Google Tags: Android Tags: Samsung Tags: Xiaomi Tags: Adobe Tags: SAP Tags: VMWare Tags: Fortinet Tags: CVE-2022-41033 Tags: CVE-2022-41040 Tags: zero-day No fix for ProxyNotShell (Read more...) The post Update now! October patch Tuesday fixes actively used zero-day...but not the one you expected appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.
By Jon Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. As I wrote about last week, I’ve been diving a lot into apps’ privacy policies recently. And I was recently made aware of a new type of app I never knew existed — family trackers. There are countless mobile apps for parents to track their children or other family members based on their location, phone usage, and even driving speed. As an anxious soon-to-be-parent, this sounds intriguing to me — it’d be a supped-up version of Find my Friends on Apple devices so I’d never have to ask my teenager (granted, I’m many years away from being at that stage of my life) when they were coming home or where they were. Just as with all other types of mobile apps, there are pitfalls, though. Life360, one of the most popular of these types of apps and even tells users what their maximum driving speed was on a given trip, was found in December 2021 to be selling precise location data on its users, potentia...
Any time we welcome this software and hardware into our homes and on our devices, it’s worth considering what sacrifices we might be making elsewhere.
Microsoft has revised its mitigation measures for the newly disclosed and actively exploited zero-day flaws in Exchange Server after it was found that they could be trivially bypassed. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, have been codenamed ProxyNotShell due to similarities to another set of flaws called ProxyShell, which the tech giant resolved last year.
Nicknamed ProxyNotShell, a new exploit used in the wild takes advantage of the recently published Microsoft Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability CVE-2022-41040 and a second vulnerability, CVE-2022-41082 that allows Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is available to unidentified attackers. Based on ProxyShell, this new zero-day abuse risk leverage a chained attack similar to
‘ProxyNotShell’ abuse less severe than 2021 attack wave due to authentication requirement
Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability.
Cisco Talos has released new coverage to detect and prevent the exploitation of two recently disclosed vulnerabilities collectively referred to as "ProxyNotShell," affecting Microsoft Exchange Servers 2013, 2016 and 2019. One of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute remote code on the targeted server. Limited exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild has been reported. CVE-2022-41040 is a Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability, while CVE-2022-41082 enables Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attackers. While no fixes or patches are available yet, Microsoft has provided mitigations for on-premises Microsoft Exchange users on Sept. 29, 2022. Even organizations that use Exchange Online may still be affected if they run a hybrid server. Cisco Talos is closely monitoring the recent reports of exploitation attempts against these vulnerabilities and strongly recommends users implement mitigation steps while waiting for securit...
November 8, 2022 update - Microsoft released security updates for CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082. We recommend that customers protect their organizations by applying the updates immediately to affected systems. The options described in the Mitigations section are no longer recommended. For more information, review the Exchange Team blog. Summary Summary On November 8 Microsoft released security updates for two zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Exchange Server 2016, and Exchange Server 2019.
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sweeping sanctions against ten individuals and two entities backed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for their involvement in ransomware attacks at least since October 2020. The agency said the cyber activity mounted by the individuals is partially attributable to intrusion sets tracked
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sweeping sanctions against ten individuals and two entities backed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for their involvement in ransomware attacks at least since October 2020. The agency said the cyber activity mounted by the individuals is partially attributable to intrusion sets tracked
The attack on Israeli organizations is the latest in a long line of attempts to compromise supply chains, as the APT looks to leverage that access to target a multitude of potential victims.
Microsoft on Thursday said it took steps to disable malicious activity stemming from abuse of OneDrive by a previously undocumented threat actor it tracks under the chemical element-themed moniker Polonium. In addition to removing the offending accounts created by the Lebanon-based activity group, the tech giant's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said it suspended over 20 malicious OneDrive
By Deeba Ahmed Cobalt Mirage is an Irani threat group believed to be linked to the Iranian Cobalt Illusion threat group,… This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Iran’s COBALT MIRAGE Threat Group Behind Ransomware Attacks in US
By Deeba Ahmed Cobalt Mirage is an Irani threat group believed to be linked to the Iranian Cobalt Illusion threat group,… This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Iran’s COBALT MIRAGE Threat Group Behind Ransomware Attacks in US