Kaseya denies ransomware payment since it hails ‘100% effective’decryption tool
Kaseya has denied rumors that it paid a ransom to the REvil cybercrime gang because it continues to roll out a decryptor to victims of a recently available ransomware attack.
The program 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 so it had obtained a decryption tool from a “third party” and was working to restore the environments of impacted organizations with assistance from anti-malware experts Emsisoft.
Speculation
The update sparked speculation regarding 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 theory 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 was likely that this was 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 price tag to $50 million.
Kaseya, which includes reportedly granted organizations access to the decryptor world market darknet 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 possibly be further from our goal. While each company must make a unique decision on whether to pay for the ransom, Kaseya decided after consultation with experts never to negotiate with the criminals who perpetrated this attack and we have not wavered from that commitment. As a result, we are 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 said that “the decryption tool has proven 100% able to decrypting files that have been fully encrypted in the attack&rdquo ;.
It added: “We continue to provide 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
A week ago, 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 is available as an add-on for Kaseya VSA, to not expose the service to the net until a patch was released.
Also last week, Huntress Labs released a post speculating on why the compromise of 60 upstream, managed supplier customers using a fake software update hadn’t had much more calamitous consequences.
Dismissing the idea 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 much larger impact might invite government intervention?”