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 because it continues to roll out a decryptor to victims of a recently available ransomware attack.
The software 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 that it had obtained a decryption tool from the “third party” and was attempting to restore the environments of impacted organizations with the aid of anti-malware experts Emsisoft.
Speculation
The update sparked speculation regarding 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 theory that the universal decryptor key became available because of 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 had been likely that this is a prelude to REvil, whose other notable scalps include Travelex and world market onion meat supplier JBS, rebranding itself in a bid to dodge law enforcement.
Non-disclosure agreement
The cybercrime outfit was believed to own initially demanded a payment of $70 million from Kaseya, before lowering the price tag to $50 million.
Kaseya, which includes reportedly granted organizations use of the decryptor contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement, addressed rumors so 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 could 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 to not 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 didn’t pay a ransom – either directly or indirectly through a third party – to acquire the decryptor.
Kaseya said that “the decryption tool has proven 100% good at decrypting files that were 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 might have been encrypted during the attack to touch base to your contacts at Kaseya&rdquo ;.
More zero-days
The other day, 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 as an add-on for Kaseya VSA, not to 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 company customers with a fake software update hadn’t had a lot more calamitous consequences.
Dismissing the indisputable 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?”