Ransomed: A Cyber Threat In The Making

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





About Ransomed

Ransomed is an emerging ransomware syndicate in the cyber world. Similar to the other ransomwares, this threat group also issues threats of exposing the stolen data of their victims unless a ransom is paid. However, their similarities with the others simply stops here. They make use the data protection laws against their victims for financial gains. They threaten their victims with fines if they do not pay the ransom. They tacitly set the ransom amounts lower than the fine for a data security violation, allowing them to exploit this discrepancy to increase the chance of payment.

Unverified Claims

Ransomed uses a special ransom variant or extorts victims only via leaked information is yet to be cleared. There is no known evidence as how this group conducts their attack. They might be related to the other data leak forums and websites like BreachForums and Exposed.

Prevention

General methods to combat a ransomware attack are as follows-
  • Mandatory strong password policies and multi-factor authentication for all critical services.
  • Use updated or modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools.
  • Employ advanced endpoint security products on all endpoints.
  • Regularly update all the software and operating systems. 
  • Have the least privilege approach to security, including the removal of all the unnecessary access to administrative shares and other services.
  • Administer a solid backup strategy including offline, encrypted, and immutable backup of data.

Conclusion

Since, this enigmatic ransomware is new to the cyber community, not much information is known to the public. But, one thing is for sure, the world of ransomwares continues to evolve making it challenging for the defenders to adapt and innovate. 



























Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 2 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1 please click  here To read part 3 please click  here To read part 4 please click  here To read part 5 please click  here Load Balancing The load balancer uses probe ports to determine as well as route the traffic to an active DBMS node, but of there's any failover then the most common SAP application architecture can automatically reconnect against the private virtual IP address without the need for the SAP application to reconfigure it, while the load balancer redirect the traffic against the private virtual IP address without any need for the SAP application to reconfigure. The loaf balancer also offers an option of DirectServerReturn which if configured, can help in directing the traffic from the DBMS VM to the SAP application layer directly to the application layer without routing through the load balancer. But, if it isn't configured, then the return traffic to the SAP application layer is routed through the load balancer. You can also use Azure Load Balan
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more