The menace actor Vice Society has claimed accountability for the ransomware assault towards the College of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in November 2022 and has reportedly revealed some stolen information on the darkish internet.
UDE made the announcement over the weekend, saying the info publication resulted from the college not complying with the attackers’ ransom calls for.
On the identical time, the college clarified that each one its safety measures have been based mostly on the Federal Workplace for Info Safety (BSI) requirements and the BSI IT baseline safety methodology.
“The truth that the attackers nonetheless managed to extract information and make ransom calls for as soon as once more illustrates the group’s extremely skilled strategy and prison intent,” the college mentioned.
UDE added that instantly after the assault was found, the college shut down your complete IT infrastructure and disconnected it from the community. Because of this, the prison group would have solely obtained a restricted quantity of information.
“The revealed information is at present being evaluated,” defined UDE. “If the breach impacts folks or establishments, they are going to be knowledgeable as quickly as doable.”
In accordance with Raj Samani, SVP chief scientist at Rapid7, it’s admirable that UDE didn’t pay the ransom demanded by Vice Society.
“In addition to not paying ransoms, organizations ought to implement applied sciences and safety controls that do not simply detect potential intrusion or lateral motion but in addition defend information ought to the menace not be eradicated earlier, similar to [through] using file encryption,” Samani instructed Infosecurity.
This isn’t Vice Society’s first ransomware assault on the schooling sector. In 2022, the group focused the Cincinnati State Technical and Group Faculty, the Medical College of Innsbruck and the Los Angeles Unified Faculty District.
“Schooling was the most extremely focused vertical when it got here to publicly disclosed ransomware assaults in 2022, with Vice Society claiming the vast majority of these incidents,” defined BlackFog CEO Darren Williams.
“When it got here to information exfiltration, over 50% of those incidents concerned information exfiltration, though we anticipate this quantity to extend as information breaches are reported a number of months later.”
Vice Society can be believed to be behind a latest leak of confidential information from 14 UK colleges.
