Today’s history lesson comes from Wired, who did a really interesting piece last year on the Notpetya cyber attack that targeted the Ukraine, but led to billions of dollars in collateral damage. And really, the story isn't even really about Ukraine or other companies. The story is truly about a nation-state’s weapon of war that was released in such a medium that it knew no borders. The collateral damage didn’t just affect it’s intended victim, but crossed over everywhere at once. It’s a warning to businesses like yours and mine to be prepared for the worst. You may not be the original intended target, but if you don’t take active precautions then you could easily be taken down like so many other companies and countries mentioned in the following story.

SUMMARY OF NOTPETYA CYBER ATTACK

For four or five years, Ukraine and Russia have been in an undeclared war that has killed more than 10,000 Ukranians. The conflict is so bad that Ukraine has become a testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics. They have penetrated networks, hacked governmental organizations and companies as well as media outlets to railway firms. They’ve even gone as far as causing widespread power outages.

During this time unbeknownst to anyone, Russian military hackers hijacked Linkos Group company’s update servers to give them a hidden back door into the thousands of PCs around the country and the world. Then they waited…and in June 2017, the Russian saboteurs used the back door they had setup and released a piece of malware called ­NotPetya, their most vicious cyberweapon yet.

The code that the hackers pushed out was honed to spread automatically, rapidly, and indiscriminately.

“To date, it was simply the fastest-propagating piece of malware we’ve ever seen,” says Craig Williams, director of outreach at Cisco’s Talos division, one of the first security companies to reverse engineer and analyze Not­Petya. “By the second you saw it, your data center was already gone.”

Within hours of its first appearance, the worm raced beyond Ukraine and out to countless machines around the world, from hospitals in Pennsylvania to a chocolate factory in Tasmania. It crippled multinational companies including Maersk, pharmaceutical giant Merck, FedEx’s European subsidiary TNT Express, French construction company Saint-Gobain, food producer Mondelēz, and manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser. In each case, it inflicted nine-figure costs. It even spread back to Russia, striking the state oil company Rosneft.

READ THE FULL STORY: https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/ 

FOUR LESSONS FOR EVERY BUSINESS FROM NOTPETYA

A number of mistakes, oversights, and criminal acts went into making this attack successful. You’ll also no doubt want to take a look at how something similar might impact you and what steps you can take to protect yourself. There are a lot of takeaways in this story, but here are four very important ones that apply to every business that utilizes computers in running their business: 

1. Enforce utilizing only approved software - Maersk would not have been impacted had ONE finance executive not installed an accounting application on his computer. This stresses the importance of creating and sticking to approved software lists within your organization. Now, this one may have been approved – the story doesn’t say, but in this interconnected world, one mistake can cost a lot.

2. Patch management of the operating systems and applications - Cyber criminals can infect computers that aren’t patched, and then grab the password from those computers to infect other computers that are patched. Patching was lackluster at best and was a known vulnerability that could have been corrected, but wasn’t.

3. Backups, backups, backups - Maersk got lucky by finding one domain controller that wasn’t infected as they had no backups – they depended on replicas saving their day, and in this case, I supposed it did, but only because of a power outage isolating one network out of hundreds.

4. Know your risks and have mitigation plans - Understand that you can do almost everything right and still be impacted – so understand your risks and have mitigation plans for your most critical processes. 

Bonus – Vendor risk management. You can do everything right, but if the firms who provide your cloud applications, websites, even IT services are vulnerable, then you must understand that their risks are your risks. Be sure to include these vendors in your overall risk management program and see how they address their risks so you can make informed decisions.

CLOSING

RealTime specializes in helping businesses with complete technology solutions, backups, cyber protections and mitigation plans, vulnerability assessments and more. If you don’t have a plan in place, contact RealTime to begin the process of protecting your business. Feel free to contact us here or call us at (334) 678-1417.