Kaseya denies ransomware payment as it hails ‘100% effective’decryption tool
Kaseya has denied rumors that it paid a ransom to the REvil cybercrime gang as it continues to roll out a decryptor world market url to victims of a current ransomware attack.
The application supply chain attack, which began on July 2, is believed to have affected as much as 1,500 organizations via the hack of IT management platform Kaseya VSA.
Kaseya revealed on July 22 so it had obtained a decryption tool from a “third party” and was attempting to restore the environments of impacted organizations with the help of anti-malware experts Emsisoft.
Speculation
The update sparked speculation regarding the identity of the unnamed alternative 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 due to law enforcement action was strengthened on July 13 when the dark web domains connected with REvil abruptly went offline.
However, some experts also said it 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 have initially demanded a payment of $70 million from Kaseya, before lowering the asking price to $50 million.
Kaseya, that has reportedly granted organizations access to 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 our continued silence on whether Kaseya paid the ransom may encourage additional ransomware attacks, but nothing could possibly be further from our goal. While each company must make its decision on whether to cover the ransom, Kaseya decided after consultation with experts to not negotiate with the criminals who perpetrated this attack and we have not wavered from that commitment. As such, we are confirming in no uncertain terms that Kaseya did not pay a ransom – either directly or indirectly through a third party – to acquire the decryptor.
Kaseya stated that “the decryption tool has proven 100% with the capacity 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 could have been encrypted during the attack to reach out to your contacts at Kaseya&rdquo ;.
More zero-days
The other day, meanwhile, security researchers from the organization 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 obtained as an add-on for Kaseya VSA, not to expose the service to the web until a patch was released.
Also last week, Huntress Labs released a blog post speculating on why the compromise of 60 upstream, managed service provider customers using a fake software update hadn’t had even more calamitous consequences.
Dismissing the proven fact that Kaseya’s system shutdown was the principal reason, security researcher John Hammond pondered, among other potential reasons, whether threat actors had learned “from previous incidents (like Colonial Pipeline) that a much bigger impact might invite government intervention?”