The US FBI and cybersecurity consultants are warning that the Scattered Spider extortion gang has shifted its focus to the aviation and transportation sectors, BleepingComputer experiences.
The group spent the previous a number of months concentrating on firms within the retail and insurance coverage sectors, and has now hit a number of airways.
Scattered Spider makes use of social engineering assaults to achieve preliminary entry, then steals knowledge and/or deploys ransomware to extort their victims.
Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 says the group regularly targets organizations’ assist desks to trick IT employees into resetting passwords for them. Unit 42’s SVP of Consulting and Risk Intelligence Sam Rubin acknowledged, “Organizations needs to be on excessive alert for stylish and focused social engineering assaults and suspicious MFA reset requests.”
Likewise, Charles Carmakal, CTO at Google’s Mandiant, mentioned in a LinkedIn submit, “We suggest that the business instantly take steps to tighten up their assist desk identification verification processes previous to including new cellphone numbers to worker/contractor accounts (which can be utilized by the risk actor to carry out self-service password resets), reset passwords, add units to MFA options, or present worker data (e.g. worker IDs) that might be used for a subsequent social engineering assaults.”
Carmakal factors to Mandiant’s steering on defending towards Scattered Spider, which notes that the group is “extraordinarily proficient at utilizing a number of types of social engineering to persuade customers into doing one thing that may enable them to achieve entry.” Mandiant says organizations ought to educate customers to be looking out for these ways.
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BleepingComputer has the story.
