Microsoft coined the term “human-operated ransomware” to clearly define a class of attack driven by expert humane intelligence at every step of the attack chain and culminate in intentional business disruption and extortion. In this blog, we explain the ransomware-as-a-service affiliate model and disambiguate between the attacker tools and the various threat actors at play during a security incident.
Microsoft has discovered several vulnerabilities, collectively referred to as Nimbuspwn, that could be chained together, allowing an attacker to elevate privileges to root on many Linux desktop endpoints. Leveraging Nimbuspwn as a vector for root access could allow attackers to achieve greater impact on vulnerable devices by deploying payloads and performing other malicious actions via arbitrary root code execution.
In this two-part blog series, we expose a modern malware infrastructure and provide guidance for protecting against the wide range of threats it enables. Part 1 covers the evolution of the threat, how it spreads, and how it impacts organizations. Part 2 is a deep dive on the attacker behavior and will provide investigation guidance.