Recently, the FBI, CISA, MS-ISAC, and HHS jointly published a lengthy advisory that highlights the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by a notorious ransomware group, RansomHub.

It emphasized how modern attackers rely on undiscovered vulnerabilities, gaps in human awareness, and the absence of hygiene security measures to infiltrate defenses and lock up information assets.

Let us explore why patching and monitoring are important against cyber threats like RansomHub.

What is RansomHub? How does it work?

RansomHub is a ransomware-as-a-service that has been in operation since February 2024 and has targeted more than 200 victims to date. It relies on a double extortion model that encrypts systems and exfiltrates its victims’ data.

The threat is known for causing massive disruption in operations in critical infrastructure organizations that provide facilities like water, electricity, healthcare, food and agriculture, transport, and emergency services.

How Does Ransomhub Ransomware Attack Work

How modern day attackers work?

RansomHub reflects how modern-day attackers use multiple techniques and Living-off-the-land methods to fool organization’s defenses like:

• They hunt and exploit known vulnerabilities in an organization’s software ecosystem,
• Create new user accounts/reenable disabled accounts to escalate privileges and move laterally across the network
• Disable defense solutions like EDR using custom tools
• Use phishing techniques to gain access to credentials or deliver payload to victims

As per the Data Breach Investigations Report 2024 by Verizon, attacks based on exploitation security vulnerabilities have increased triply by 180% from last year.

Why patching, monitoring and other security activities are an essential part of cybersecurity?

• Modern-day attackers keep evolving their attacking techniques, coming up with more persisting, difficult-to-detect techniques to mask their presence in their victim’s infrastructure.
• They don’t have fixed working hours, meaning that they can attack almost anytime they find the most advantageous.
• They use evolving tools that are highly adaptive making them difficult to defend against weaponizing tools of their targets against them (living off the land attack)
• Increased reliance on third-party service providers/vendors can also expose an organization to the risk of third-party vulnerability exploitation-based breach
• Attackers exploit gaps in human awareness to engage in social engineering-based phishing attacks

It becomes essential for organizations to engage in security activities like:

• Regularly patching systems to keep up with the latest security updates that address all the vulnerabilities. Engage in vulnerability management to preemptively identify, group, and address known and unknown vulnerabilities.
• Threat hunting their environment for threats and implement best practices to keep their infrastructure and its sensitive information assets secure.
• Ensure round-the-clock security monitoring of the infrastructure for critical activities like reenabling disabled users, clearing system logs, using malicious tools like Mimikatz to gather credentials and escalate privileges, etc.
• Frame stricter third-party regulations that emphasize periodical assessment of security posture for security vulnerabilities

How can SharkStriker help?

360-degree security assessment using real-world techniques

Through SharkStriker’s comprehensive security assessment, security experts can help you discover known and unknown weaknesses with real-world techniques deployed by modern attackers, giving you a complete picture of your security posture with security recommendations to boost your security posture.

24×7 dedicated expertise for monitoring, threat hunting, and incident response

Get round-the-clock access to cybersecurity experts like threat hunters, security analysts, threat experts, and incident responders so you need to stay two steps ahead of threats, catching them before they find you.

Compliance management

With SharkStriker, organizations get dedicated compliance experts who can guide them at every step of their compliance journey. All SharkStriker’s services are in line with regional and global cybersecurity regulations, making it simpler to achieve globally trusted cybersecurity standards.

Multi-tenant platform purpose-built for cybersecurity and compliance

SharkStriker offers organizations with a multi-tenant platform engineered to unlock visibility and offer meaningful posture-specific insights. With features like automated CIS-based posture checks and vulnerability management, it helps secure what is the most precious in an evolving threat landscape and changing compliance.