Quick cyberthreat video ‘newsdesk’ launched by Acronis

At Acronis, we’re constantly monitoring for dangers to your data, introducing fixes for newly-discovered vulnerabilities, and issuing alerts and recommendations to help you stay protected. The threat landscape is ever-shifting, and our global network of Acronis Cyber Protection Operations Centers (CPOCs) works round the clock to proactively detect and defend against malware, viruses, and cryptojacking.

Our work to keep you informed of hazards in the digital landscape now includes Acronis’ YouTube channel because we recently launched a new series of video updates that summarize the latest threats straight from our CPOCs.

Here’s a look at some of the recent breaking news and analysis:

VPN provider Pulse Secure, which boasts that 80% of Fortune 500 companies rely on their product, has become a target of the Black Kingdom family of ransomware attacks. These attacks take advantage of a file read vulnerability to exfiltrate credentials, then use those credentials to compromise networks.

Although Pulse Secure has released a patch to address this vulnerability, organizations that haven’t applied the patch remain at risk. For companies using Acronis Cyber Protect, the patch management feature ensures such vulnerabilities are closed. In addition, Acronis Active Protection – the integrated, AI-based antiransomware defense – stops Black Kingdom and other ransomware families from infecting end-user machines.

On June 12 of this year, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee fell victim to a ransomware attack that caused a large network outage. Among other effects, this inhibited the ability of law enforcement to respond to non-life-threatening incidents. Several days later, the city’s website still displayed a note stating that online services were unavailable.

Initial investigations suggest this was the result of a spear-phishing email attack against state employees, likely using either the Maze, DoppelPaymer, or NetWalker ransomware variants. Thankfully, Acronis Active Protection detects and stops all of these attacks.

System-on-a-chip maker MaxLinear has confirmed that its network systems were compromised by Maze ransomware. Roughly 1TB of data is believed to have been stolen, including the personally identifiable information (PII) and financial information of employees. The threat actors released 10GB of this data.

As a result, MaxLinear was forced to take all of its network systems offline and hire outside consultants to conduct an investigation. Once again, Acronis Cyber Protect’s antiransomware protection is proven to be effective against Maze — which could have saved MaxLinear a lot of money and damage to its reputation.

Fraudsters are using Google Alerts to push out fake notifications of data breaches, tricking users into visiting malicious websites, and downloading malware in their attempts to resolve the problem.

These fraudulent alerts have been observed to work through both Chrome and Firefox. Acronis Cyber Protect’s URL filtering can keep browsers safe by managing access to specific websites known to be malicious and blocking links like these.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) states that 393 breaches of protected health information, resulting in potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) were reported between June 2019 and June 2020. Of these, 142 incidents were the result of phishing attacks, with recent attacks at District Medical Group and Marinette Wisconsin seeing the breach of 10,190 and 27,137 patients’ files, respectively.

Even employees who have been trained about phishing scams and reminded on a regular basis not to open suspicious messages, links, or files can fall victim. Acronis’ behavioral endpoint anti-malware and Acronis Cyber Protect’s URL filtering capabilities can provide a safety net against such attacks.

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For the latest reports on all the latest emerging cyberthreats from Acronis’ cybersecurity experts, subscribe to the Acronis YouTube channel and get the CPOC updates as they are posted.