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Can Organizations Still Pay Ransomware Demands?
On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) released its opinions on two matters (Department of Education v. Brown and Biden v. Nebraska) related to the Biden Administration’s student-loan debt-forgiveness plan (Plan). As written and intended, the Plan was set to discharge $10,000 to $20,000 of an eligible borrower’s debt, conditional on multiple criteria, including the borrower’s annual income (with its own caveats surrounding tax filings) and the specific type of loan in the borrower’s name.
Many organizations are required to conduct an annual incident response tabletop exercise to meet compliance or audit requirements, which can be a source of great consternation within various organizations. Check out Advisory Director, Tom Schwab's recent article "How to get the most out of your tabletop exercise and reduce your stress".
Kivu Consulting, Inc. (Kivu), a leading provider of cybersecurity and forensic services worldwide, welcomes Justin Harvey as Vice President. The cyber-defense, incident response, and threat hunting industry veteran will lead Kivu’s Digital Forensics & Incident Response business unit focused on crisis response to cyberattacks and helping organizations quickly contain and recover.
Following a notable decline in 2022, Kivu has observed signs of increased activity in Q1 2023. Most of these events result from threat actors targeting older, known vulnerabilities that could have been addressed. Realizing your business has been impacted by a successful ransomware attack can paralyze decision-makers causing long-term pain in the future. Below are some things for your organization to keep in mind.
Microsoft recently disclosed two zero-day vulnerabilities that affect Microsoft Exchange servers 2013, 2016, and 2019 (CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082). Currently, there is no patch for these vulnerabilities, and they have actively been exploited. The newly disclosed Exchange vulnerabilities are similar to the ProxyShell exploit, which can result in remote code execution via Powershell.
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