Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Rubrik Zero Labs’ recent study accentuated several hard truths we think are important and warrant a response from Rubrik’s CISO Advisory Board. First, let’s confirm what many of us have already discussed: It’s not fun to be a CISO right now. There’s an overwhelming amount of expectation—from the board to business unit owners—to figure out how to grow and use data, but also keep it secure, and figure out what happens when it’s not.

If you’re the victim of a ransomware attack, there are no guarantees that you can recover your stolen data. The best you can do is mitigate the effects of the attack and remove the ransomware from your device. The steps to recover from a ransomware attack include isolating your device, removing the ransomware, restoring your backed-up data and changing any compromised login credentials.

“The evolving threat landscape” sounds like an overused clichè; however, marked shifts in threat actor tactics in the past year are evidence of widespread and brazen growth in confidence among threat actors. Evident in recent incidents, such as ALPHV, AKA Black Cat’s exploitation of legal avenues, and the emergence of “The Five Families” alliance, cybercriminals are stretching their levels of coordination and reach.

It goes without saying that organizations must back up their critical data to ensure business continuity in the event of cyber attacks, disasters, operational failures, or insider threats. But are passive backups enough in today’s environment of sophisticated cyber threats? Despite having backups and various security tools to monitor infrastructure, organizations remain vulnerable to attackers who are still managing to penetrate defenses.

Clark County School District in Nevada, the fifth-largest school district in the United States, recently experienced a massive data breach. Threat actors gained access to the school district’s email servers, which exposed the sensitive data of over 200,000 students. The district is now facing a class-action lawsuit from parents, alleging it failed to protect sensitive personal information and take steps to prevent the cybersecurity attack.

The Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model, and its readily available scheme, remains to be the preferred method for emerging threat actors to carry out complex and lucrative cyberattacks. Information theft is a significant focus within the realm of MaaS, with a specialization in the acquisition and exfiltration of sensitive information from compromised devices, including login credentials, credit card details, and other valuable information.

There’s a massive elephant in the room: unstructured data. It’s valuable, and it needs to be protected. Let’s talk about why.

The different types of ransomware include crypto ransomware, locker ransomware, scareware, leakware and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS). Ransomware is a type of malware, also known as malicious software, that prevents victims from accessing the data stored on their devices until they’ve paid a cybercriminal a certain amount of money, commonly referred to as a ransom.

Man Bites Dog: In an unusual twist in cybercrime, the ransomware group BlackCat/ALPHV is manipulating the SEC's new 4-day rule on cyber incident reporting to increase pressure on their victims. This latest maneuver highlights a sophisticated understanding of regulatory impacts in ransomware strategies.