The IT Nerd

Late last week, ABN Amro Bank NV announced that unauthorized parties may have accessed the data of some of its clients after supplier AddComm was the victim of a ransom-ware attack this month.

AddComm, which distributes documents and tokens to clients and employees for ABN Amro, said in a statement that the hack took place between May 5 and May 17 and disrupted its services for a few days.

At this time, it is not clear what type of data was involved, and ABN Amro said it has no indication that the unauthorized parties have used the data of its clients and that the lender’s systems were not affected.

This comes in the same month that Banco Santander SA said that information of clients and staff managed by a third-party was accessed without authorization, and Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and ING Groep were among dozens of companies to suffer from the MOVEit file transfer tool breach.

Meanwhile, the European Central Bank, which oversees lenders in the region, conducted a stress test to examine how banks respond to and recover from cyber attacks and observed the extensive use of outsourced functions as one of the main challenges impacting 88% of banks that claim they are at least partially reliant on service providers to operate their core banking system.

Dave Ratner, CEO, HYAS had this to say:

   “The fact is that every exploit has to do one thing before it wreaks havoc: communicate with the threat actor controlling it. Identifying and thwarting that communication is the first, last and best chance an organization has to prevent an attack. Third-party breaches will continue to escalate and be a critical pain point for organizations of all sizes until true cyber resiliency implementations are put into effect and organizations have not just the operational internal visibility that they require, but also the capability to detect those telltale signs of a breach and imminent attack, early in the kill chain, and stop it before damage ensues.”

Emily Phelps, Director, Cyware:

   “The recent ransomware attack underscores the critical need for proactive cybersecurity measures in the financial sector. To address these challenges, modernizing traditional SOCs into cyber fusion centers can enable real-time threat intelligence sharing and collaboration across institutions, fostering a collective defense approach. By integrating strategic AI-driven cybersecurity solutions, financial institutions can proactively detect and mitigate threats, ensuring the resilience and integrity of their operations.”

Third party attacks are a danger that every business needs to wrap their heads around. If they don’t, they’ll be the next victim through no fault of their own.

News has emerged that the hacker group known as RansomHub is threatening to release the sensitive data of high-end Christie’s art auction house in New York, including financial data and client addresses by the end of May, if no ransom is paid:

Now, RansomHub has posted a new thread on a dark web site, assuming responsibility for the attack, and claiming it grabbed customer names and birth dates. At this moment it is impossible to verify the authenticity of the claims, but with RansomHub’s history, it’s possible they are telling the truth.

RansomHub was born out of the disappearance of the ransomware-as-a-service known as ALPHV, or BlackCat. 

With a ransomware-as-a-service model, one group builds and maintains the malware while others, called affiliates, do the actual breaching and encrypting. When affiliates successfully extort money from a victim, they get a piece of it, while a piece goes to the developers. When an ALPHV affiliate breached Change Healthcare earlier this year, they allegedly successfully extorted the healthcare giant for $22 million. However, when it was time to split the prize, the developers took all of it and just disappeared, leaving the affiliate with roughly 4TB of stolen sensitive data.

This affiliate was later named RansomHub and it tried, on its own, to extort Change Healthcare again. 

In Christie’s case, the group said it would release the timer by the end of May, since it couldn’t come to an agreement with the company.

Darren Williams, CEO and Founder, Blackfog had this to say:

 “The clock is ticking for Christies Art House who has a major decision to make now that criminal gang RansomHub has implemented a payment deadline.  With the personal and financial data belonging to their high-profile clients at risk, this is indeed quite worrying. 

The ‘to pay or not to pay’ dilemma is a serious issue for all types of organisations who are facing a rising wave of ransomware attacks. High profile organisations such as Christie’s, which sells high value items upwards of £600 million, will always be on the radar or cyber attackers looking for a quick win with large financial gain. 

Once the data is in the hands of the attackers, the focus must be on handling the incident and repercussions as quickly as possible, leaning on experts to help ease the process when possible.  Once the clean up is done, the focus must shift to preventing these attacks in the future by implementing technology designed to prevent the exfiltration of data, mitigating the risks of future attacks and extortion.”

RansomHub, the attacker group behind this attack, is quite new, first identified by BlackFog in February of this year. The criminal gang has since claimed attacks on multiple organisations – notably UnitedHealth Group, American Clinical Solutions and now Christie’s art auction house in New York.

It will be interesting to see what happens next as we’re only two days from the end of May. I’m pretty sure that this group will release some sort of data in retaliation for not getting paid. But not paying them is the correct course of action as cybercrime groups cannot be allowed to succeed in terms of extorting money from their victims.