Stamos added that ransomware hackers are "effectively conglomerate platforms, of which they provide a bunch of different tools, and then they allow affiliates to do the work on top of them." White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the recent attacks will likely be discussed when President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet face-to-face later this month. MORE: By the Numbers: Cryptocurrency crash As a result, panic-buying pushed gas prices to their highest levels in seven years just ahead of Memorial Day weekend travel. The cyberattack led to a multiday shutdown for the pipeline that provides nearly half of all fuel consumed on the East Coast. The recent attack on Colonial Pipeline, operators of one of the United States' largest fuel conduits, also showed that victims are forced to decide between paying criminals their ransom demands or being unable to operate their businesses. and Russia - the nation from which many of these attacks are believed to emanate. Ransomware strikes have surged over the past year due to a confluence of factors, experts say, including the rise of hard-to-trace cryptocurrency, a work-from-home boom that has resulted in new IT vulnerabilities and a political climate marked by ongoing tensions between the U.S. The 21-year-old, who made his name by hacking Pentagon software systems as a teenager to make them more secure, said he would continue to look for weaknesses in attacker infrastructure when he had time.What often begins as an employee clicking a seemingly innocuous link in their email can result in a crisis that brings multibillion dollar businesses to their knees, stokes geopolitical tensions and has ripple effects throughout the global economy.Ī recent spate of ransomware attacks has crippled critical American infrastructure, disrupted major food supply chains and revealed that no firm - big or small - is safe from these insidious cyberattacks. “It shows that even though we may think of all attackers as being very sophisticated, the reality is that since this is financially motivated, there’s going to be a range of sophistication levels,” Cable told CyberScoop.Ĭybercriminals “looking to make a quick buck” are “unlikely to have a robust security team,” Cable pointed out. The ransomware authors have since fixed the glitch, but Cable’s efforts count as a small yet significant win against a broader scourge of ransomware incidents that has affected countless U.S. That prevented some $27,000 in potential victim losses. The firm confirmed the ransomware attacks on Thursday, saying it was “urgently working on a solution to remove malware from infected devices.”Ĭable took to Twitter late Wednesday asking victims of the ransomware to get in touch so he could help recover their data. He said 50 people from various parts of the world messaged him, and that he was able to get their data back using the same glitch in the hackers’ payment scheme. The new strain of ransomware, known as QLocker, has flooded the internet in recent days, targeting network storage systems made by Taiwan-based QNAP Systems. Cable, who served as a cybersecurity adviser to the Department of Homeland Security during the 2020 election, realized that if he changed one letter from lowercase to uppercase in the “transaction ID” the hackers were using to track payments, the system mistook the input for a victim that had already paid and unlocked the files. The hackers were demanding 0.01 Bitcoin, or roughly $550 at the time, to unlock the doctor’s files. The doctor was preparing to pay the ransom when Cable began looking at the hackers’ payment system, according to Cable. Stanford University student and security researcher Jack Cable got a call Wednesday from a family friend, who is a doctor, asking for help because cybercriminals had locked the doctor’s computer. The hackers behind a nascent strain of ransomware hit a snag this week when a security researcher found a flaw in the payment system and, he says, helped victims save $27,000 in potential losses.
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