WASHINGTON—The federal government is warning companies of the potential for ransomware attacks this weekend.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory outlining their concerns, with the agencies stating that while they do not have any specific threat reporting indicating ransomware attacks will occur over the Labor Day holiday weekend, they noted a spike in ransomware attacks have occurred around previous holidays.
The FBI and CISA are urging companies to be on the lookout for:
- Unusual inbound and outbound network traffic
- Compromise of administrator privileges or escalation of the permissions on an account
- heft of login and password credentials
- Substantial increase in database read volume
- Geographical irregularities in access and log in patterns
- Attempted user activity during anomalous logon times
- Attempts to access folders on a server that are not linked to the HTML within the pages of the web server
- Baseline deviations in the type of outbound encrypted traffic since advanced persistent threat actors frequently encrypt exfiltration
As CUToday.info has previously reported, credit unions have been victimized in prior ransonware attacks.