2021 Security for Week 26 Roundup
Summary:
This week we have an update on the Tulsa Oklahoma Ransomware attack and data breach as well as an update on the Ireland health system breach by the same group. NBC and others have recaps of water security. Several groups are doing cybersecurity exercises and this included a grid attack simulation.
News
Tulsa Oklahoma Ransomware Attack
As previously noted (https://yasb2018.blogspot.com/2021/05/2021-week-19-security-roundup.html) Tulsa was the victim of a Ransomware Attack. Now it appears that some of the breached data (18,000 + files) has been released. This again points to the danger of paying the ransom as it appears there is little honor among the hackers. It should be noted that Conti (the suspected group behind the attack) has a long history of this.
Official press release
Conti attack against Ireland Health system
HSE Chief executive Paul Reid said the overall cost of the attack first reported 6 weeks ago (https://yasb2018.blogspot.com/2021/06/2021-week-20-23-security-roundup.html) could rise to half a billion euro or more. These costs include the ransom, services, upgrades, and other capital costs. He also irritated that there will no doubt be ongoing costs both financial and personal for those affected. In related news, it appears that so far 75% of the servers have been decrypted since paying the ransom. Again underscoring the slow recovery even when paying the ransom.
Review of Water cybersecurity
The Water Sector Coordinating Council announced the result of their water and wastewater survey.
NBC also did a review of the current state of cybersecurity for the U.S. water system
Electric meters hacked to get outage information
A Texas hacker, frustrated at the refusal to say who was and who wasn't subjected to blackouts, has released information himself. He was able to get the data by hacking smart meters from
Landis+Gyr which are used extensively in Texas. By wardriving, he was able to get the uptime from the meters and then compiled the data to see if there were trends. While this data may not be too sexy, it does allow a potential attacker to gain insight as to the infrastructure capabilities of buildings and their perceived importance to grid operators. This could potentially disclose hidden government buildings, R&D firms, or other targets of interest.
National guard performs Electric Grid simulation
National Guardsmen just completed a two-week training exercise called Cyber Yankee. This is an annual training event that brings guardsmen from throughout the New England region to test their responses and to promote collaboration between the Guard and private/public partners. This year's scenario was a ransomware attack against the nation's power grid. This gave the units a chance to exercise the new Cyber 9-Line system that was developed by the U.S. Cyber Commands for cyber units to use as a template for communication of cyber events.
US Cyber Command leads its annual Cyber Flag competition
The U.S. cyber command held its largest Cyber Flag competition in which 430 cyber professionals on 17 teams from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada try and defend against virtual attacks. While we don't know the actual scenarios, the focus is said to be timely and include things that were likely in the news. The hope is going forward they will be able to test out-of-the-box attacks to help defend against attacks that have not been tried before.
Workforce West Virginia
It appears that on April 13, 2021 Workforce West Va learned of a data breach. Not a lot of information but it appears that they have sent notifications to those affected.
NSA working with private industry
The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has announced that they were working with government and civilian partners to help harden the networks of systems in the United States. One of the first initiatives was funding for MITRE's research for the D3FEND protocol to improve upon the existing ATT&CK framework. D3FEND includes models for countering common attack techniques and gives backing to the defensive techniques to help defenders better understand the technologies and techniques being used.
NSA Release
Legislative actions
A group of bipartisan United States House of Representatives lawmakers introduced the American Cybersecurity Literacy Act. The goal of this act would be to require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to create a cyber literacy campaign. The purpose would be to help the American public to stay safe online and hopefully prevent cyber attacks.
Jobs
The city of Enid Oklahoma is looking for a Network Specialist. Check the link for more information.
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