Kaseya denies ransomware payment as it hails ‘100% effective’decryption tool
Kaseya has denied rumors so it paid a ransom to the REvil cybercrime gang as it continues to roll out a decryptor to victims of a current ransomware attack.
The application supply chain attack, which began on July 2, is believed to have affected up to 1,500 organizations via the hack of IT management platform Kaseya VSA.
Kaseya revealed on July 22 that it had obtained a decryption tool from a “third party” and was working to restore the environments of impacted organizations with the aid of anti-malware experts Emsisoft.
Speculation
The update sparked speculation as to the identity of the unnamed 3rd party, with Allan Liska of Recorded Future’s CSIRT team positing a disgruntled REvil affiliate, the Russian government, or that Kaseya themselves had paid the ransom.
The idea that the universal decryptor key became available as a result of police action was strengthened on July 13 once the dark web domains connected with REvil abruptly went offline.
However, some experts also said it absolutely was likely that this is a prelude to REvil, whose other notable scalps include Travelex and meat supplier JBS, rebranding itself in a bid to dodge law enforcement.
Non-disclosure agreement
The cybercrime outfit was believed to possess initially demanded a payment of $70 million from Kaseya, before lowering the asking price to $50 million.
Kaseya, which has reportedly granted organizations usage of the decryptor contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement, addressed rumors that it had paid a ransom in a statement yesterday (July 26):
Recent reports have suggested that our continued silence on whether Kaseya paid the ransom may encourage additional ransomware attacks, but nothing could be further from our goal. While each company must make its own decision on whether to cover the ransom, Kaseya decided after consultation with experts not to negotiate with the criminals who perpetrated this attack and we have not wavered from that commitment. As a result, we’re confirming in no uncertain terms that Kaseya didn’t pay a ransom – either directly or indirectly through an alternative party – to acquire the decryptor.
Kaseya stated that “the decryption tool has proven 100% capable of decrypting files that were fully encrypted in the attack&rdquo ;.
It added: “We continue to supply the decryptor to customers that request it, and we encourage all our customers whose data may have been encrypted during the attack to reach out to your contacts at Kaseya&rdquo ;.
More zero-days
A week ago, meanwhile, security researchers from the business that unearthed the zero-day Kaseya vulnerabilities exploited by REvil disclosed a trio of additional zero-day flaws in another Kaseya product.
The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) advised users of cloud-based Kaseya Unitrends, which can be acquired as an add-on for world market onion (http://www.lecalabrie.org) Kaseya VSA, not to expose the service to the web until a patch was released.
Also a week ago, Huntress Labs released a article speculating on why the compromise of 60 upstream, managed supplier customers via a fake software update hadn’t had a lot more calamitous consequences.
Dismissing the proven fact that Kaseya’s system shutdown was the primary reason, security researcher John Hammond pondered, among other potential reasons, whether threat actors had learned “from previous incidents (like Colonial Pipeline) that a bigger impact might invite government intervention?”