La Jornada – Biden orders an investigation into a cyber attack affecting nearly a thousand companies in the United States
New York. A cyber attack on the American company Kaseya, which provides IT tools, affected more than a thousand companies in at least 17 countries, including Mexico, and forced the closure of about 800 stores in one of the major supermarket chains in Sweden.
US President Joe Biden said on Saturday that he had ordered intelligence agencies to investigate who was behind the sophisticated attack it carried out ransomware It raised suspicions about Russian gangs.
There have been victims in 17 countries so far, including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico and Spain, Bloomberg News quoted Aryeh Goretzky, a researcher at cybersecurity firm ESET, as saying.
Security firm Huntress Labs has blamed the Russia-linked hacker gang, Revil, for the attack. Last month, the FBI blamed the same group for crippling the operations of JBS SA, the world’s largest meat producer.
“We are not sure” who was behind the attack. “The initial idea was not the Russian government, but we are still not sure,” he said, noting that his country would respond if they decided Russia was at fault.
At the moment, it is difficult to calculate the true extent of the attack using ransomware, a type of software that exploits a company or individual’s computer security flaws, paralyzing their systems to demand a reward for unlocking it.
A major Swedish supermarket chain announced, on Saturday, the temporary closure of most of its 800 stores after a cyber attack that paralyzed its boxes, according to a Swedish company affiliated with the group, and the problem was linked to the attack on Cassia.
Cassette, who described the cyber attack as “complex,” said it had reached a “very small percentage” of its customers. However, they also provide services to other companies, which hackers have been able to access to demand ransom.
The Miami-based company said it had learned of the attack on the company software VSA noon on Friday, before the long Independence Day weekend.
Kaseya, which claims to have more than 40,000 customers, provides information technology (IT) tools for small and medium-sized businesses, including software VSA to manage your network of servers, computers, and printers from a single source.
attacks ransomware They have become frequent and the United States has been particularly affected in recent months by operations that have affected large companies, such as meat giant JBS and pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline, as well as local communities and hospitals.
The nature of the attack is similar to that suffered by the editor software SolarWinds, which affected US companies and government organizations in late 2020.
The latter, which Washington attributes to the Russian intelligence services, was “with the logic of espionage, while we are here with the logic of extortion,” said Jerome Belloa, a cybersecurity expert at consultancy Weston.
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