Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (THE1765256680)
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Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of The Buffalo News'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 The Buffalo News 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 The Buffalo News breach identified under incident ID THE1765256680.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of The Buffalo News's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thebuffalonews, the number of followers: 17844, the industry type: Newspaper Publishing and the number of employees: 434 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 755 and after the incident was 507 with a difference of -248 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 The Buffalo News and their customers.
On 28 May 2024, Lee Enterprises disclosed Ransomware issues under the banner "Lee Enterprises Data Breach by Qilin Ransomware".
Major U.S.
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Online and print production systems, and exposing 350 GB of data, with nearly 39,779 records at risk, plus an estimated financial loss of $2 million (recovery costs).
In response, while recovery efforts such as Spent $2 million on recovery efforts continue, and stakeholders are being briefed through Breach notification letters provided to impacted individuals and Maine regulators.
The case underscores how Ongoing (collaborating in further investigations), with advisories going out to stakeholders covering Breach notification letters provided to impacted individuals; offering one year of complimentary credit monitoring services.
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 attack vector not specified, but ransomware often exploits public-facing apps and Valid Accounts (T1078) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating raaS attacks frequently use compromised credentials for access. Under the Execution tactic, the analysis identified User Execution: Malicious File (T1204.002) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware typically executed via malicious files or scripts. Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task (T1053.005) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware often establishes persistence via scheduled tasks. Under the Privilege Escalation tactic, the analysis identified Valid Accounts (T1078) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating compromised credentials likely used for privilege escalation. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Obfuscated Files or Information (T1027) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware like Qilin often obfuscates malicious payloads and Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware frequently disables security tools to evade detection. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified OS Credential Dumping (T1003) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware groups often dump credentials for lateral movement. Under the Discovery tactic, the analysis identified Account Discovery: Domain Account (T1087.002) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware actors typically enumerate domain accounts and File and Directory Discovery (T1083) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating 350 GB of data exfiltrated implies extensive file discovery. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services: Remote Desktop Protocol (T1021.001) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware often uses RDP for lateral movement and Remote Services: SMB/Windows Admin Shares (T1021.002) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating common ransomware lateral movement technique. Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Local System (T1005) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating 350 GB of data exfiltrated from local systems. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating 350 GB of data exfiltrated (confirmed in incident). Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating ransomware attack implies data encryption for impact and Service Stop (T1489) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating disrupted online and print production systems. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- The Buffalo News Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/thebuffalonews/incident/THE1765256680
- The Buffalo News CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/thebuffalonews
- The Buffalo News Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/the1765256680-the-buffalo-news-ransomware-june-2025/
- The Buffalo News CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/thebuffalonews/history
- The Buffalo News CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://www.scworld.com/brief/almost-40k-impacted-by-lee-enterprises-ransomware-attack
- 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