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About 200 US businesses have been hit by a "colossal" ransomware attack, according to a cyber-security firm.
Huntress Labs said the hack targeted Florida-based IT company Kaseya before spreading through corporate networks that use its software.
Kaseya said in a statement on its own website that it was investigating a "potential attack".
Huntress Labs said it believed the Russia-linked REvil ransomware gang was responsible.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, a federal agency, said in a statement that it was taking action to address the attack.
The cyber-breach emerged on Friday afternoon as companies across the US were clocking off for the long Independence Day weekend.
The two big things that are keeping cyber-security professionals up at night lately are ransomware attacks and supply chain attacks. This latest incident combines both nightmares into one big Independence Holiday weekend-ruining event for hundreds of US IT teams.
Ransomware is the scourge of the internet. Multiple organised criminal gangs are constantly attempting to gain access to computer networks to hold them hostage. The rate of attack is relentless but it can take a lot of time and effort on the criminals part to successfully hijack one victim's computer system.
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(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 05 2021, @05:30PM (2 children)
Sorry, I just had to confirm in detail that something that stupid was done. And stupid on many levels. Was nobody checking the work? I guess I'm being idealistic. But you'd hope that something as important, maybe critical, as backups, would have some kind of cross-checking done.
Some years ago (mid-90s) I had a job and one assignment was pretty much just assemble systems and install software (industrial controls- PLC, SCADA, etc.) IBM PS/2 server hardware, running OS/2 (yes). I wish I could remember the backup software brand; it watched for any filesystem change, and did incremental backup to tape within seconds. I thought that was awesome, and yet I'm not aware of any other software that does that behavior.
In most backup scenarios we've kept weekly full backups indefinitely (remove the write-allow tab), and done differential ones daily if not hourly. Basically we could always go back to some point in the past if needed. Restore might have been tedious, but the data was there. Tape is far too cheap to be stupid (with overwriting things).
Any knowledge of backup software that watches filesystem and backs up any changes on the fly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 06 2021, @02:06AM (1 child)
This was back in the 90's too.
Head guy implemented it, checked it was working, monitored it and did manual tape reads for several weeks to be sure it was working. Handed off actual physical tape swapping and monitoring to Ass. Ass put his brain-fart on it without telling anybody, and just trusted the messages. I said LTO, but I'm not really sure. I do know that the tapes they were using were stupidly expensive.
That sounds like it was part of the OS. Back then that would have been a lot of overhead for an add-on program.
These days you would need to exclude a lot of files. Every damn program out there is constantly saving its status to disk.
Not much knowledge of any current back-up software. Wasn't my job back then either, I was just close enough to know what happened. For my own system I just do a copy of /home now and again. Fits on a CD. Anything else is just a download away.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 06 2021, @02:57AM
OS of course knows what's being written to disk. You (quite easily) tagged files and directories you wanted backed to tape in the software. Worked very well. Sure wish I had written it down. It was so awesome, I "assumed" all tape software worked that way.
Funny story- 2 guys were feverishly writing gobs of C on Unix (not sure which flavor- maybe HP-UX) for months. They decide to do a backup to tape. I mean, seriously major large project, many months, full-time. Anyway, guy gives tar command, but reverses disk and tape devices. So yes, OS said "okay, you want to write the raw tape to the raw disk. I can do that."
Fortunately they were taking notes as they went, so it took them another 2 weeks to recreate the whole project. I was doing sector-level stuff in those days, and offered to recover lots of files, or at least parts of files, but everyone declined (it was a VERY political / competitive place).