World Market Darknet Shortcuts - The Easy Way

Kaseya denies ransomware payment as it hails ‘100% effective'decryption tool



Kaseya has denied rumors so it paid a ransom to the REvil cybercrime gang as it continues to roll out a decryptor to victims of a recently available ransomware attack.



The program supply chain attack, which began on July 2, is believed to own affected as much as 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 world market darknet was trying to restore the environments of impacted organizations with the help of anti-malware experts Emsisoft.
Speculation

The update sparked speculation regarding 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 as a result 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 was likely that this is 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 selling price to $50 million.

Kaseya, which has reportedly granted organizations use 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 that our continued silence on whether Kaseya paid the ransom may encourage additional ransomware attacks, but nothing could possibly be further from our goal. While each company must make its own decision on whether to cover 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 are 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% with the capacity of decrypting files that 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 throughout the attack to reach out to your contacts at Kaseya&rdquo ;.

More zero-days

The other day, meanwhile, security researchers from the business 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, to not expose the service to the internet until a patch was released.

Also a week ago, Huntress Labs released a blog post speculating on why the compromise of 60 upstream, managed supplier customers with a fake software update hadn't had much 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 bigger impact might invite government intervention?"