Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154)
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Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of Halcyon'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 Halcyon 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 Halcyon breach identified under incident ID VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Halcyon's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/halcyonai, the number of followers: 28829, the industry type: Computer and Network Security and the number of employees: 489 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 754 and after the incident was 645 with a difference of -109 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 Halcyon and their customers.
A newly reported cybersecurity incident, "Ransomware Operators Systematically Neutralize Backups Before Striking", has drawn attention.
A growing trend in ransomware attacks reveals a calculated strategy: threat actors now prioritize disabling backup infrastructure before deploying encryption, ensuring victims have no recovery options.
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Backup repositories, domain controllers, Active Directory, business systems, and exposing True.
In response, and began remediation that includes Rebuilding identity infrastructure, validating clean restore points, credential rotation, while recovery efforts such as Alternative recovery methods (e.g., file resilience, key capture) continue.
The case underscores how teams are taking away lessons such as Traditional backup defenses are insufficient against modern ransomware tactics. Attackers now dedicate weeks to neutralizing recovery options, requiring alternative recovery methods and proactive measures like file resilience and lateral movement prevention, and recommending next steps like Adopt alternative recovery methods (e.g., file resilience, key capture), Implement real-time encryption interception and Limit lateral movement to prevent spread of encryption.
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 Valid Accounts (T1078) with high confidence (90%), with evidence including harvest domain admin credentials, and operate with legitimate admin credentials. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified OS Credential Dumping (T1003) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating harvest domain admin credentials during prolonged dwell period and Group Policy Preferences (T1552.006) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating credential harvesting as part of network mapping. Under the Discovery tactic, the analysis identified Account Discovery (T1087) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating mapping networks, backup repositories and retention policies and File and Directory Discovery (T1083) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating mapping backup repositories and retention policies. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services: Remote Desktop Protocol (T1021.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating prolonged dwell period averaging 70+ days and Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares (T1021.002) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating lateral movement to backup infrastructure. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Inhibit System Recovery (T1490) with high confidence (100%), supported by evidence indicating mITRE ATT&CK T1490 such as disabling backup infrastructure before encryption, Indicator Removal: File Deletion (T1070.004) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating backups are often already purged, retention policies altered, and Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating terminating backup services before encryption begins. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with high confidence (100%), supported by evidence indicating deploying encryption after backup neutralization and Defacement: Internal Defacement (T1491.001) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating altering retention policies to trigger automatic deletion. Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Account Manipulation (T1098) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating compromising multiple privileged accounts during dwell period. Under the Privilege Escalation tactic, the analysis identified Valid Accounts (T1078) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating domain admin credentials harvested, used to manipulate backups. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- Halcyon Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/halcyonai/incident/VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154
- Halcyon CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/halcyonai
- Halcyon Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/veegartothal1781807154-veeam-gartner-halcyon-total-assure-ransomware-january-2022/
- Halcyon CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/halcyonai/history
- Halcyon CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://www.halcyon.ai/blog/why-ransomware-deletes-your-backups-before-you-know-youve-been-hit
- 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