It was reported earlier today, the U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies published a joint advisory warning of attacks perpetrated by a cybercrime gang known as the Daixin Team primarily targeting the healthcare sector in the country.
“The Daixin Team is a ransomware and data extortion group that has targeted the HPH Sector with ransomware and data extortion operations since at least June 2022,” the agencies said.
The alert was published Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Further to this, over the past four months, the group has been linked to multiple ransomware incidents in the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector, encrypting servers related to electronic health records, diagnostics, imaging, and intranet services.
Also, it’s said to have exfiltrated personal identifiable information (PII) and patient health information (PHI) as part of a double extortion scheme to secure ransoms from victims.
It appears that one of those attacks was aimed at OakBend Medical Center on September 1, 2022, with the group claiming to have siphoned roughly 3.5GB of data, including over one million records with patient and employee information.
Additionally, it also published a sample containing 2,000 patient records on its data leak site, which included names, genders, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, and other appointment details, according to DataBreaches.net.
Earlier in the year, on October 11, 2022, it notified its customers of emails sent by “third-parties” regarding the cyber attack, stating it’s directly informing affected patients, in addition to offering free credit monitoring services for 18 months.
Observations show that per the new alert, initial access to targeted networks is achieved by means of virtual private network (VPN) servers, often taking advantage of unpatched security flaws and compromised credentials obtained via phishing emails.
In addition, upon gaining a foothold, the Daixin Team has been observed moving laterally by making use of remote desktop protocol (RDP) and secure shell (SSH), followed by gaining elevated privileges using techniques like credential dumping.
“The actors have leveraged privileged accounts to gain access to VMware vCenter Server and reset account passwords for ESXi servers in the environment,” the U.S. government said. “The actors have then used SSH to connect to accessible ESXi servers and deploy ransomware on those servers.”
Moreover, the Daixin Team’s ransomware is based on another strain called Babuk that was leaked in September 2021, and has been used as a foundation for a number of file-encrypting malware families such as Rook, Night Sky, Pandora, and Cheerscrypt.
Concerning mitigations, it’s recommended that organizations apply the latest software updates, enforce multi-factor authentication, implement network segmentation, and maintain periodic offline backups.
Commenting on the story is Oscar Miranda, Chief Technology Officer for Healthcare at Armis, as he claims that “many mistake ransomware attacks against healthcare providers as efforts to steal Protected Health Information (PHI) and other critical data; however, many launch these attacks purely to disrupt operations enough for organisations to pay to resume critical services. After all, it’s much more efficient and profitable for attackers to extort providers into paying a multi-million-dollar ransom to regain access to their operations than it is to exfiltrate and sell hundreds of thousands of individual health records on the black market.”
“With strained budgets, healthcare providers’ cybersecurity postures are being weakened in a trade-off that’s forcing them to make the tough decision to reallocate funds to areas believed to have the most direct impact on patient care. Yet, the unfortunate reality is that ransomware does impact patient care as well. This disconnect is what’s widening security gaps and worsening the issue across the board.”
“Take connected devices, for example. Hospitals rely on these devices to monitor patients and provide critical care. As such, these assets have become essential to the patient journey, but are the weakest security link in healthcare and serve as an attack vector for ransomware. This is exacerbated when hospitals lack the deep contextual visibility needed to secure these assets. In most cases, they are not even sure how many assets are on the network.”
“Healthcare leaders need to acknowledge these gaps and invest in cybersecurity that bridges them as a key element of ensuring patient safety.”
