Two major Spanish companies, including radio company Sociedad Española de Radiodifusión (Cadena SER) and NTT-owned IT services firm Everis, have become the latest victims of a targeted ransomware attack, which began in the early hours of yesterday morning. Both companies have told employees to shut down computers, and have disconnected their networks from the internet.
More on the story here: https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/04/cyber-attack-hits-spanish-companies-including-radio-network
It is particularly alarming to eye attackers successfully targeting IT consultancy firms. Those who are supposed to protect us from ransomware and prevent it fall victims to it, emphasizing catastrophic unpreparedness even amid technology consultants.
We may expect a further spike of targeted attacks against IT consultants that frequently disregard the fundamentals of cybersecurity to cut their internal costs on a highly-competitive and turbulent market. Worse, those companies commonly have privileged access to a myriad of their customers’ networks without any control or due monitoring. Therefore, cybercriminals will soon start aggrandizing their attack scope to infect all their customers first and them disarm and paralyze the IT consultancies.
Visibility of you digital assets is crucial in a modern threat landscape. You cannot protect what you don’t see or don’t know. Large organizations shall likewise consider enhancing their third-party risk management to ensure that their suppliers won’t serve a Trojan horse.