Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154)
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Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of TotalEnergies'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 TotalEnergies 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 TotalEnergies breach identified under incident ID VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of TotalEnergies's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/totalenergies, the number of followers: 5079578, the industry type: Oil and Gas and the number of employees: 82218 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 822 and after the incident was 775 with a difference of -47 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 TotalEnergies 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 and Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with lower confidence (30%), supported by evidence indicating prolonged dwell period averaging 70+ days. 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 and Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets (T1558) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating compromising multiple privileged accounts. Under the Discovery tactic, the analysis identified File and Directory Discovery (T1083) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating mapping backup repositories and retention policies and Account Discovery (T1087) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating high value targets such as Backup repositories, domain admin credentials. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services (T1021) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating limiting the spread of encryption to additional systems and Use Alternate Authentication Material (T1550) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating operate with legitimate admin credentials. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Inhibit System Recovery (T1490) with high confidence (100%), with evidence including mITRE ATT&CK as T1490 (Inhibit System Recovery), and disabling backup infrastructure before deploying encryption, Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating terminating backup services before encryption begins, and Indicator Removal (T1070) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating manipulating retention settings to trigger automatic deletion. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486) with high confidence (100%), with evidence including deploying encryption, and data encryption such as true and Defacement (T1491) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating by the time the ransom note appears. Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Account Manipulation (T1098) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating compromising multiple privileged accounts and Create Account (T1136) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating prolonged dwell period averaging 70+ days. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with lower confidence (40%), supported by evidence indicating data breach impacting recovery efforts. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- TotalEnergies Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/totalenergies/incident/VEEGARTOTHAL1781807154
- TotalEnergies CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/totalenergies
- TotalEnergies Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/veegartothal1781807154-veeam-gartner-halcyon-total-assure-ransomware-january-2022/
- TotalEnergies CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/totalenergies/history
- TotalEnergies 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