James Slaby

You don’t have to work in cybersecurity to be aware of the recent discovery that a sophisticated state actor had potentially compromised tens of thousands of private companies and government institutions in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. The means was a software supply-chain: attackers breached the software distribution infrastructure of tech vendor SolarWinds, embedding malware in its popular Orion network management tool. When customers downloaded the latest Orion product update, the malware surreptitiously spread throughout their organizations, in many cases finding and forwarding sensitive data to external servers controlled by the attackers. Now comes news that SolarWinds was not the only victim of this Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack. Cybersecurity vendor Malwarebytes disclosed earlier this week that it had also been victimized by the same threat actors.

The success of the massive SolarWinds supply-chain attack presents an urgent new cybersecurity challenge to every business. We plumb the tactics used in the SolarWinds breach and show how Acronis defends against it and similar attacks.

The threat of a large-scale ransomware attack once again grabbed headlines in the mainstream press as the U.S.’s Federal Bureau of Investigations, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Health and Human Services warned that cybercriminals were targeting American healthcare providers. The alert, which was issued Wednesday, warned that there was “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers” focused on “data theft and disruption of healthcare services.” The warning comes as hospitals, medical facilities, and healthcare workers around the country are faced with spiking cases of COVID-19. The timing is no accident, as cybercriminals are leveraging the need for these healthcare providers to have access to their data and systems.