Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (CITSTAABS1782779964)
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Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of Absa Group's Ransomware and lateral movement inside company's environment.
- Overview of affected data sets, including SSNs and PHI, and why they materially increase incident severity.
- How Rankiteo’s incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score.
- How this cyber incident impacts Absa Group Rankiteo cyber scoring and cyber rating.
- Rankiteo’s MITRE ATT&CK correlation analysis for this incident, with associated confidence level.
Full Incident Analysis Transcript
In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Absa Group breach identified under incident ID CITSTAABS1782779964.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Absa Group's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/absa, the number of followers: 962894, the industry type: Financial Services and the number of employees: 41900 employees
After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 752 and after the incident was 625 with a difference of -127 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.
In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Absa Group and their customers.
On 24 October 2019, City of Johannesburg disclosed ransomware and DDoS issues under the banner "Cyberattacks Disrupt Johannesburg and South African Banks in Coordinated Extortion Campaign".
In late October 2019, a series of cyberattacks targeted critical infrastructure in South Africa, crippling municipal services and financial institutions in a coordinated extortion effort.
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting bill payments, supplier transactions and 112 emergency call center, and exposing threatened data leak (City of Johannesburg).
In response, moved swiftly to contain the threat with measures like bolstered defenses (banks), recovery efforts (City of Johannesburg), while recovery efforts such as restoring full functionality (City of Johannesburg) continue.
The case underscores how ongoing, teams are taking away lessons such as The attacks highlighted the growing threat of cyber extortion and the vulnerability of public and private entities to modern cyber threats.
Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.
MITRE ATT&CK® Correlation Analysis
Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating exploiting vulnerabilities in both public and private sector systems. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware attack, encrypting key systems (City of Johannesburg) and Defacement (T1491) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating disrupting essential services and online banking. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating threatened to leak stolen data if the ransom wasn’t paid. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified Brute Force (T1110) with lower confidence (40%), supported by evidence indicating exploited vulnerabilities in systems (implied access). Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating dDoS attacks flooding networks (Standard Bank, ABSA). Under the Command and Control tactic, the analysis identified Application Layer Protocol (T1071) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating attackers claimed to have backdoors into the city’s network. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Exploitation of Remote Services (T1210) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating coordinated extortion campaign targeting multiple entities. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- Absa Group Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/absa/incident/CITSTAABS1782779964
- Absa Group CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/absa
- Absa Group Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/citstaabs1782779964-city-of-johannesburg-absa-standard-bank-ransomware-april-2021/
- Absa Group CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/absa/history
- Absa Group CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/cyber-attacks-hit-the-city-of-johannesburg-and-south-african-banks/
- Rankiteo A.I CyberSecurity Rating methodology: https://www.rankiteo.com/Images/rankiteo_algo.pdf
- Rankiteo TPRM Scoring methodology: https://static.rankiteo.com/model/rankiteo_tprm_methodology.pdf