On July 14, 2021, WooCommerce issued an emergency patch for a critical vulnerability allowing an unauthenticated attacker to access arbitrary data in an online store’s database. WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world and is installed on over five million websites. Additionally, the WooCommerce Blocks feature plugin, which is installed on more than 200,000 sites, was affected by the vulnerability and was patched at the same time.

Kroll experts have noticed an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by cybercriminals seeking to turn a profit in two distinct incident types. First, many ransomware operators are now threatening and conducting DDoS attacks as an additional pressure tactic during the ransom negotiation process. Second, also known as ransom denial of service (RDoS), attackers threaten DDoS attacks that will take down an organization’s public-facing services unless a ransom is paid.

On the afternoon of July 2, 2021, Kaseya reported that it had been impacted by a ransomware attack affecting its Virtual System Administrator (VSA) product and advised users to shut down VSA servers immediately. Initial reporting indicates this was a well-orchestrated supply chain attack impacting about 60 managed services providers (MSPs) and up to 1,500 client organizations by leveraging a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-30116).

The recent slate of breaches and regulatory actions has prompted many companies who had been doing the minimum in terms of proactive cyber risk management to rethink their approach. In the U.S., new regulations are emerging (for states like Virginia, Colorado, Massachusetts and many others), and existing regulators are increasing their enforcement, as we’ve seen by the NY Dept of Financial Services (NYDFS) and the SEC.

Phishing schemes are always evolving. This past year, email thread hijacking took phishing to new depths of subterfuge as criminals hid in plain sight within existing conversations. But no matter how well cybercriminals have refined their messaging or counterfeited legitimate logos and branding, the one constant has always been their delivery method: email. Until now. Online chat services have become a new target for cybercriminals to introduce documents loaded with malware into organizations.

Industries most impacted in 2019 continued to be hard hit in both 2020 and so far in 2021, including healthcare, education and financial services. However, the greatest percentage increases occurred in industries that had been generally spared in 2019. The overall implication is that data attacks became broader and deeper during the pandemic, a trend that continues during the recovery.

Businesses in Singapore face mounting challenges to protect customer data as a result of the newly enacted Personal Data Protection (Amendment) Bill (PDPA). With higher penalties expected to be levied from February 2022, it’s imperative that enterprises, particularly those collecting customer data, have a solid information security framework and incident response plan in place.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally shifted the cyber threat landscape for Australia’s health sector, with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) reporting a 84% increase in the number of cyber security incident reports relating to the health sector between 2019 and 2020.1 As custodians of vast volumes of highly sensitive information, the industry continues to find itself at the mercy of cyberattacks that paralyze systems until a ransom is paid—threatening the security of patient d

In 2021, Kroll investigators have had multiple opportunities to respond to a series of interconnected network intrusions, ransomware events and cyber incidents which, upon investigation and review, possessed overlapping tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and similar indicators of compromise (IOC) among them. The incidents affected organizations of various sizes across diverse industry sectors through what Kroll’s investigations confirmed was a range of separate intrusion vectors.

Kroll, Red Canary and VMware conducted a survey of over 400 information security and 100 legal and compliance leaders from companies with over $500M in annual revenue to capture the current state of incident response from a technical and legal perspective. Our goal was to highlight trends, identify common challenges and understand how organizations are maturing their preparedness, detection and response programs.