Kaseya denies ransomware payment because it hails ‘100% effective’decryption tool
Kaseya has denied rumors so it paid a ransom to the REvil cybercrime gang since it continues to roll out a decryptor to victims of a current ransomware attack.
The program supply chain attack, which began on July 2, is believed to own 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 attempting to restore the environments of impacted organizations with assistance from 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 theory that the universal decryptor key became available because of police force action was strengthened on July 13 once the dark web domains associated 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, that has reportedly granted organizations usage of the decryptor contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement, addressed rumors so it had paid a ransom in a statement yesterday (July 26):
Recent reports have suggested which our continued silence on whether Kaseya paid the ransom may encourage additional ransomware attacks, but nothing might be further from our goal. While each company must make its own decision on whether to pay for 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 are confirming in no uncertain terms that Kaseya didn’t pay a ransom – either directly or world market darknet indirectly through an alternative party – to acquire the decryptor.
Kaseya stated that “the decryption tool has proven 100% effective at decrypting files which 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 through the attack to touch base 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 is available being an add-on for Kaseya VSA, to not expose the service to the web until a patch was released.
Also a week ago, Huntress Labs released a post speculating on why the compromise of 60 upstream, managed service provider customers with a fake software update hadn’t had a lot more calamitous consequences.
Dismissing the idea 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 larger impact might invite government intervention?”