Kaseya denies ransomware payment because 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 recent ransomware attack.
The application supply chain attack, which began on July 2, is believed to possess affected around 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 the “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 third 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 because of law enforcement action was strengthened on July 13 once the dark web domains associated with REvil abruptly went offline.
However, some experts also said it absolutely 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 possess initially demanded a payment of $70 million from Kaseya, before lowering the selling price to $50 million.
Kaseya, that has reportedly granted organizations usage of the decryptor contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement, world market onion addressed rumors that it had paid a ransom in a record 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 the ransom, Kaseya decided after consultation with experts not to negotiate with the criminals who perpetrated this attack and we’ve not wavered from that commitment. As such, we’re confirming in no uncertain terms that Kaseya did not pay a ransom – either directly or indirectly through a 3rd party – to obtain 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 may have been encrypted throughout the attack to touch base to your contacts at Kaseya&rdquo ;.
More zero-days
A week ago, meanwhile, security researchers from the corporation 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 being an add-on for Kaseya VSA, to not 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 via a fake software update hadn’t had even 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 much larger impact might invite government intervention?”