"Kaseya Says up to 1,500 Victims Affected by Ransomware, as Biden Directs 'Full Resources' to Investigate"
A massive ransomware attack has compromised up to 1,500 businesses, according to a Tuesday update from a Florida IT company called Kaseya. Kaseya offers its VSA platform to managed service providers (MSPs) to whom other companies outsource IT functions. The company stated that only 50 of its 35,000 customers had been breached, but given the reach of its MSP customers, 50 victims can quickly multiply into many, many more. The self-proclaimed culprit behind the attacks is the Russia-based ransomware gang REvil. REvil claims that this attack has affected more than 1 million victims and is seeking $70 million in cryptocurrency collectively. Researchers at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure stated that the attackers exploited previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities that Kaseya was in the midst of patching when the outbreak began. The researchers noted that the Kaseya-filtered attack is more globally disbursed than other ransomware attacks and compared this ransomware incident to the 2017 WannaCry cryptoworm that infected hundreds of thousands of computers. The company shut down the software over the holiday weekend and also released detection tools.