Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General Breach Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (PEN1592115111625)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General breach identified under incident ID PEN1592115111625.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pennsylvania-office-of-attorney-general, the number of followers: 7071, the industry type: Law Enforcement and the number of employees: 799 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 534 and after the incident was 465 with a difference of -69 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 Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and their customers.

On 09 August 2023, Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office disclosed Data Breach issues under the banner "Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office Data Breach".

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office reported a data breach in August 2023, where residents' personal information, including social security numbers, may have been accessed during a 'cyber incident.' The breach caused the office's website, email, and phones to go offline.

The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting website, email and phones, and exposing personal information and social security numbers.

In response, teams activated the incident response plan, and began remediation that includes Identity protection services offered to affected individuals, and stakeholders are being briefed through Public advisory and notification to affected individuals via email/mail (exact method unspecified).

The case underscores how Ongoing (no evidence of misuse reported as of disclosure), with advisories going out to stakeholders covering Residents advised to check if affected via provided link (URL not specified in text).

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.

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 website, email, and phone services to go offline (systems disruption suggests web-facing exploit) and Valid Accounts (T1078) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating unauthorized actors accessed its systems (implies possible abuse of legitimate credentials). Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Local System (T1005) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating personal information, including Social Security numbers... may have been accessed. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol (T1048) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating data exfiltration such as Unconfirmed (no evidence of misuse reported) (implies possible exfiltration prior to detection). Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with lower confidence (30%), supported by evidence indicating systems offline (website, email, phones) (disruption could imply encryption or denial-of-service) and Service Stop (T1489) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating website, email, and phone services to go offline. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Indicator Removal: File Deletion (T1070.004) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating no evidence of misuse (suggests possible log/trace cleanup by threat actor). These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.