CISA, FBI share guidance for MSPs and their customers impacted in Kaseya attack

CISA and the FBI published guidance for the victims impacted by the REvil supply-chain ransomware attack against Kaseya.

CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have published guidance for the organizations impacted by the massive REvil supply-chain ransomware attack that hit Kaseya ‘s cloud-based MSP platform.

The US agencies provides instructions to affected MSPs and their customers on how to check their infrastructure for indicators of compromise.

Kaseya has released a detection tool that could be used by organizations to determine if your infrastructure has been compromised.

Below the list of recommendations included in the advisory published by CISA and the FBI for impacted MSPs:

• Download the Kaseya VSA Detection Tool. This tool analyzes a system (either VSA server or managed endpoint) and determines whether any indicators of compromise (IoC) are present.    
• Enable and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) on every single account that is under the control of the organization, and—to the maximum extent possible—enable and enforce MFA for customer-facing services.
• Implement allowlisting to limit communication with remote monitoring and management (RMM) capabilities to known IP address pairs, and/or
• Place administrative interfaces of RMM behind a virtual private network (VPN) or a firewall on a dedicated administrative network.

MSP customers affected by the attack are advised to use and enforce MFA wherever possible and protect their backups by placing them on air-gapped systems.

CISA and FBI recommend affected MSPs:

• Download the Kaseya VSA Detection Tool. This tool analyzes a system (either VSA server or managed endpoint) and determines whether any indicators of compromise (IoC) are present.    
• Enable and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) on every single account that is under the control of the organization, and—to the maximum extent possible—enable and enforce MFA for customer-facing services.
• Implement allowlisting to limit communication with remote monitoring and management (RMM) capabilities to known IP address pairs, and/or
• Place administrative interfaces of RMM behind a virtual private network (VPN) or a firewall on a dedicated administrative network.

The two US agencies also recommend affected MSP customers:

• Ensure backups are up to date and stored in an easily retrievable location that is air-gapped from the organizational network;
• Revert to a manual patch management process that follows vendor remediation guidance, including the installation of new patches as soon as they become available;
• Implement:
  • Multi-factor authentication; and
  • Principle of least privilege on key network resources admin accounts.

“Due to the potential scale of this incident, the FBI and CISA may be unable to respond to each victim individually, but all information we receive will be useful in countering this threat,” states the advisory published by the FBI.

The two federal agencies also provided resources to share awareness about the incident and best practices to follow.

The investigation is still ongoing, according to security firm Huntress Labs at least 1000 organizations have been impacted, making this incident, one of the largest ransomware attacks in history.

The situation could be worse, according to a message shared by the group on its leak site, the gang claims to have encrypted files on more than a million systems and offers a way out for a universal descriptor.

“On Friday (02.07.2021) we launched an attack on MSP providers. More than a million systems were infected. If anyone wants to negotiate about universal decryptor – our price is 70 000 000$ in BTC and we will publish publicly decryptor that decrypts files of all victims, so everyone will be able to recover from attack in less than an hour. If you are interested in such deal – contact us using victims “readme” file instructions.” reads the message on its leak site.

REvil ransomware initially asked the owners of endpoints infected in this campaign 44,999 USD in Bitcoin, but now it seems to be interested to close the game with a single huge ransom of $70 million.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Kaseya)

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