The U.S. authorities has warned of ongoing malicious exercise by the infamous Hive ransomware gang, which has extorted greater than $100 million from its rising checklist of victims.
A joint advisory launched by the FBI, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, and the Division of Well being and Human Providers on Thursday revealed that the Hive ransomware gang has acquired upwards of $100 million in ransom funds from over 1,300 victims for the reason that gang was first noticed in June 2021.
This checklist of victims contains organizations from a variety of industries and important infrastructure sectors similar to authorities services, communications, and knowledge know-how, with a deal with particularly healthcare and public well being entities.
Hive, which operates a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) mannequin, claimed the Illinois-based Memorial Well being System as its first healthcare sufferer in August 2021. This cyberattack pressured the well being system to divert look after emergency sufferers and cancel pressing care surgical procedures and radiology exams. The ransomware gang additionally launched delicate well being info of about 216,000 sufferers.
Then, in June 2022, the gang compromised Costa Rica’s public well being service earlier than concentrating on New York-based emergency response and ambulance service supplier Empress EMS the next month. Over 320,000 people had info stolen, together with names, dates of providers, insurance coverage info, and Social Safety numbers.
Simply final month, Hive additionally added Lake Charles Memorial Well being System, a hospital system in Southwest Louisiana, to its darkish net leak web site, the place it posted a whole bunch of gigabytes of knowledge, together with affected person and worker info.
Hive additionally focused Tata Energy, a prime energy era firm in India, in October.
The joint FBI-CISA-HHS advisory warns that Hive usually positive aspects entry to sufferer networks through the use of stolen single-factor credentials to entry group distant desktop programs, digital personal networks, and different internet-facing programs. However CISA additionally warns that the ransomware group additionally skirts some multi-factor authentication programs by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities.
“In some instances, Hive actors have bypassed multi-factor authentication and gained entry to FortiOS servers by exploiting CVE-2020-12812,” the advisory says. “This vulnerability permits a malicious cyber-actor to log in and not using a immediate for the consumer’s second authentication issue (FortiToken) when the actor adjustments the case of the username.”
The advisory additionally warns that Hive actors have been noticed reinfecting victims that restored their environments with out paying a ransom, both with Hive or one other ransomware variant.
Microsoft’s Risk Intelligence Heart (MSTIC) researchers warned earlier this 12 months that Hive had upgraded its malware by migrating its code from Go to the Rust programming language, enabling it to make use of a extra advanced encryption technique for its ransomware as a service payload.
The U.S. authorities shared Hive indicators of compromise (IOCs) and ways, strategies, and procedures (TTPs) found by the FBI to assist defenders detect malicious exercise related to Hive associates and cut back or remove the affect of such incidents.
