1.) The Department of Justice of South Africa suffered a ransomware attack on September 6th,2021 and news is out that the government’s purposed legal cell hasn’t recovered its data from the attack yet.
Therefore, the malware attack has resulted in the blockage of email and website services to employees and to the public even today- at the time of writing this news piece.
Good news is that the DoJ of South Africa was proactively prepared for such situations and so is trying its best to recover all of its data by this weekend.
So, those seeking bail services, services from the website like final report, and monthly child maintenance should wait for a week as the authorities are trying their best to get back on track as soon as possible.
2.) Microsoft, in association with San Francisco based security services provider RiskIQ, discovered that those distributing RYUK ransomware have already used their recently patched zero-day flaw as an exploit.
Dubbed as Windows MSHTML flaw, Russia-based Wizard Spider hacking group, known to develop and maintain RYUK ransomware, leveraged the bug in their recent campaign before the Satya Nadella led company could fix it early this week. So, the Windows Operating system developing company has called all organizations to update their affected systems before any untoward occurs to their network from RYUK spreading cyber crime syndicate.
3.) A cyber security based analytics firm named Unit 42 has discovered that those spreading ransomware are indulging in triple extortion tactics where they first steal data, encrypt a database until a ransom is paid and then use the same target to distribute malware or to launch DDoS attacks at their clients, customers or eco-partners.
Unit 42 has detected that those companies operating in west, and serving manufacturing, defense, and healthcare sector were most vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Therefore, companies out there, please be prepared for the worst if you are not confident of your defenseline against ransomware attacks.
4.) In what seems to be a historical decision, Biden administration is planning to target cryptocurrency payments against ransomware attacks with strict sanctions. And this includes sanctioning some coin forms, persons and regions, restriction of transactions on blockchain network and stricter compliance norms to be followed by technology companies, payment processors, administrators, and cryptocurrency exchanges. There is a high probability that United States can soon design and endorse a new payment framework that prohibits US persons from performing direct crypto transactions to non-US persons.
