Tag Archive for: offers

State Department Offers Reward for BlackCat Hacker Information – The Presidential Prayer Team

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Change Healthcare is still recovering from the ransomware attack in February.

The Department of State recently announced a $10 million reward for information about the Blackcat ransomware group. 

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “The ALPHV BlackCat ransomware-as-a-service group compromised computer networks of critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and worldwide, deploying ransomware on the targeted systems, disabling security features within the victim’s network, stealing sensitive confidential information, demanding payment to restore access, and threatening to publicize the stolen data if victims do not pay a ransom.”

The hacking group launched a ransomware attack against Change Healthcare in February, which shut down payment management systems in hospitals and pharmacies across the country. This forced many patients to pay out-of-pocket for their health care for several days. The healthcare service company, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, has still not entirely recovered from the attack, though it has been able to resume its payment processing capabilities.

As the Lord Leads, Pray with Us…

  • For U.S. officials as they seek information on the BlackCat and other ransomware hacking groups.
  • For members of the various government agencies seeking to secure the cyber infrastructure of the nation.

Sources: The Hill, Reuters

RECENT PRAYER UPDATES

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Mid-West Data Depot offers safe, convenient server data backup storage

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businessman-showing-virtual-security

With the advent of computers came the need to store information. Nearly every business of every size has countless gigabytes of data related to their operations and their customers. Against the landscape of constant threats from computer viruses and cyber-attackers, data backups have become a big concern.

In the data industry, best practices call for following a 3-2-1 backup strategy; three copies of your data, using two different types of media, and one copy is stored offsite. That’s where Mid-West Data Depot comes in.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The new service offered by media company Mid-West Family South Bend makes perfect sense: Companies need a safe place to store their data backups. Mid-West Data Depot is literally located inside a tornado shelter in South Bend that has redundant power supplies, four huge pipelines to the internet, security, and plenty of rack space for computer servers.

Data Depot site manager Bill Gamble said after you consider putting the right infrastructure in place, the business is straightforward.

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“It’s a place to store your data offsite. When we bought this building, it was already a data storage facility. Thick walls. No windows. We affectionately call it The Bunker. If there’s a disaster, this is where you want your data to be.”

STORED DATA IS SAFE DATA
Gamble said offsite data storage is growing in popularity.

“Data that isn’t backed up can be lost forever due to any number of issues. Our infrastructure means we’ll never lose power, we have reliable and redundant network connections, and there’s no weather that can compromise The Bunker. It’s that simple.”

Gamble points out that 43 percent of cyber incursions annually target small businesses. He adds that of those businesses, 46 percent have fewer than 1,000 employees.

“The scary thing is everyone’s going to get hacked eventually. What’s sad is that 70 percent of small businesses that suffer a catastrophic data breach close within a year. If you own a business, just ask your insurance agent if you can get a discount because you have an offsite backup.”

A LOCAL DATA DEPOT
One of the differentiators Gamble points to is…

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RustDoor macOS Backdoor Targets Cryptocurrency Firms with Fake Job Offers

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Feb 16, 2024NewsroomEndpoint Security / Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency Firms

Several companies operating in the cryptocurrency sector are the target of a newly discovered Apple macOS backdoor codenamed RustDoor.

RustDoor was first documented by Bitdefender last week, describing it as a Rust-based malware capable of harvesting and uploading files, as well as gathering information about the infected machines. It’s distributed by masquerading itself as a Visual Studio update.

While prior evidence uncovered at least three different variants of the backdoor, the exact initial propagation mechanism remained unknown.

That said, the Romanian cybersecurity firm subsequently told The Hacker News that the malware was used as part of a targeted attack rather than a shotgun distribution campaign, noting that it found additional artifacts that are responsible for downloading and executing RustDoor.

Cybersecurity

“Some of these first stage downloaders claim to be PDF files with job offerings, but in reality, are scripts that download and execute the malware while also downloading and opening an innocuous PDF file that bills itself as a confidentiality agreement,” Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research and reporting at Bitdefender, said.

Since then, three more malicious samples that act as first-stage payloads have come to light, each of them purporting to be a job offering. These ZIP archives predate the earlier RustDoor binaries by nearly a month.

The new component of the attack chain – i.e., the archive files (“Jobinfo.app.zip” or “Jobinfo.zip”) – contains a basic shell script that’s responsible for fetching the implant from a website named turkishfurniture[.]blog. It’s also engineered to preview a harmless decoy PDF file (“job.pdf”) hosted on the same site as a distraction.

Fake Job Offers

Bitdefender said it also detected four new Golang-based binaries that communicate with an actor-controlled domain (“sarkerrentacars[.]com”), whose purpose is to “collect information about the victim’s machine and its network connections using the system_profiler and networksetup utilities, which are part of the macOS operating system.

In addition, the binaries are capable of extracting details about the disk via “diskutil list” as well…

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US government offers $10 million reward in bid to track down Hive ransomware leaders

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The Department of State also announced it is offering $5 million for any information that leads to the arrest of any individual around the world conspiring to participate in Hive ransomware activity. 

In 2023, the State Department’s ‘Rewards for Justice’ program issued rewards for any information that could link Hive or other groups targeting US critical national infrastructure to a foreign government.

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