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The Threat of Ransomware 2.0 for Law Practices
During the past few months, there has been a significant paradigm shift in the cybersecurity world. Threat actors from Russia, in particular, have significantly enhanced their capabilities to target individual businesses and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) or IT companies. As of late December, hacking groups such as Sodinokibi (aka "Evil Corp") and Ryuk have been impacting thousands of businesses across the United States in a multitude of ways. It is critical that lawyers, their firms and the companies they serve be aware of these threats and take the appropriate measures to proactively secure their own — and their clients' — sensitive and private information.
Tracking Major Recent Ransomware Attacks
Approximately 16 months ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned MSPs that certain threat actors were planning large-scale attacks against them. In August of 2019, we saw the largest distributed ransomware attack encrypt and hold hostage the data of approximately 450 businesses and impact thousands of computers and servers. During Thanksgiving week, they hit 100 businesses and then, on December 24, approximately 1,300 businesses were victims.
The ransomware encrypted almost every computer, server, external backup, cloud backup, etc., resulting in the inability to access a single file. Think about this for a minute. The second largest attack in our nation's history was against small and medium-sized businesses; not banks, large corporations or hospitals.
How does something like this happen? It is simple. The threat actors gain access to the IT company's remote management tools that they use to access a law practice's computers and servers, load their malicious code into the tool and instruct the tool to download and install the ransomware into all the computers. Within minutes, they can strike tens of thousands of computers. These attacks typically occur during the early morning hours, so the first indicator of the attack is employees' inability to log in and access any information on the computers. The result is literally every single file and database is encrypted with ransomware.
Breaking Down the Fallout of a Ransomware Attack
Based on some of the most recent ransomware attacks, most businesses experienced a two- to four-week outage. In every case that we handled, the business experienced 100 percent encryption on every device and backup. Due to the pervasiveness of the ransomware attacks, there was no recovery option except to pay the threat actors the ransom payment. Most businesses had to pay, on average, $45,000 to the threat actors for a decryption tool. Add on top of that, the business interruption, inability to collect A/R or access critical business files and the complete rebuilding of every computer and server. The price tag for these attacks easily exceeds $100,000 for a small business and significantly more for a medium-sized business.
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