Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah
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Just decided to check in on their Twitter feed again. Still nothing. Total silence since the issue began. No word if any customers have been restored yet.
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Just looking at this a month later (one month to the day.) Still waiting on clarification from Protek as to what they meant when they said that this didn't happen. Their Twitter and Facebook still remain silent, having gone dark the day that this occurred. They website doesn't have new content (but few would.) But did just before. The only change seems to be that they used to prominently display their team on their site, and that appears to have been removed from what I can tell. If I were to guess, that's either because too many of those people are no longer there and/or the site made it really clear that the staff were nearly all break/fix reactive techs and that there was only one "proactive" staffer in the entire company (Protek's own words) so advertising themselves as a proactive solution probably didn't fly.
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The entire page has just been removed.
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@DustinB3403 yeah, that was their prominent page prior to a month ago. And their ransomware page was removed previously. LOL
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@DustinB3403 said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
The entire page has just been removed.
Access Denied when trying to access it using archive.org
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LOL, this did not age well.
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@LilAng said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
LOL, this did not age well.
The only way it could've been worse is if they said "We're all vulnerable to emergencies (because of Protek), but if you are prepared. . . ."
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@LilAng said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
LOL, this did not age well.
I had seen that one... two weeks before their compromise was discovered! They might have already been infected by that point!
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Been another month, and no response here, and their feeds are still totally silent. They just popped into my head and I thought that I'd look up to see if they had made any announcements or anything about their situation yet. Guess not. But BAU seems to have totally died that day.
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Another company follow up while I'm thinking about them. Their social media has remained totally silent since Feb 4th. And their blog that was always a twice weekly thing has been silent since a few days before that. The news reports definitely continue to seem to have been real, contrary to what they stated.
Goes to their blog one week before the compromise.
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Another MSP had this happen.
Just followed up to see that ProTek is still silent, and still hasn't responded here about the claim that they didn't have this happen.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
Another company follow up while I'm thinking about them. Their social media has remained totally silent since Feb 4th. And their blog that was always a twice weekly thing has been silent since a few days before that. The news reports definitely continue to seem to have been real, contrary to what they stated.
Goes to their blog one week before the compromise.
The title of the article is correct. Just remove the dash
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@IRJ said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
@scottalanmiller said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
Another company follow up while I'm thinking about them. Their social media has remained totally silent since Feb 4th. And their blog that was always a twice weekly thing has been silent since a few days before that. The news reports definitely continue to seem to have been real, contrary to what they stated.
Goes to their blog one week before the compromise.
The title of the article is correct. Just remove the dash
Oh now that is funny crap!
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@IRJ remove the dash and add a colon after "mistakes"...
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@scottalanmiller said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
So we heard from customers of Protek Support in Salt Lake City that the MSP has been hit with ransomware that has gone on to hit all of their clients as well. From what we understand, they are currently on four days of customers being without their files and they aren't cleaning them up yet. We would suspect that their internal systems have been hit and they are tied up dealing with that.
Pretty good timing considering we just posted about this MSP Risk a few days ago.
How do MSPs survive this kind of level of destruction? Are clients talking to each other? Are clients going on to talk to other MSPs and look for assistance when their main support is gone?
We rarely think about how the MSP itself would be offline indefinitely and potentially unable to function in the case of a breach like this. But in this case, it looks like the MPS has been impacted to such a degree that they aren't even able to start helping customers yet. Four days with no action is a lifetime to an impacted business. Something like a hundred customers down for a whole week with no end in sight, it sounds like.
Each customer is going to need every machine - desktops, servers, storage, etc. to be totally wiped, reloaded, and restored. Imagine the manpower necessary to do that.
WiPro outsourcing giant breach: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/experts-breach-at-it-outsourcing-giant-wipro/
PCM MSP Breach: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/06/breach-at-cloud-solution-provider-pcm-inc/
Ongoing mess: https://www.insynq.com/support/#status
^^^ Note the word meticulous in the "we've cleaned things out" paragraph. SMHCCH Walters Kluwer: https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/the-wolters-kluwer-cch-outage-what-happened
Maersk: Saved by a physical DC that was off in Africa after a power outage.
MSPs: Vulnerabilities in RMM/PSA software allowed compromise a while back.
Bing Search: MSP Breach
Privileged Access Workstation is the only way to go today. There needs to be an air-gap between systems being used to manage clients/customers and the MSP's day to day production systems.
There is no excuse for not segmenting operations, administration, cloud services systems, backup systems, and more. None. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
Oh, and this:
Courtesy of Malware-Traffic-Analysis. It's virtually always the human. -
@PhlipElder said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
Privileged Access Workstation is the only way to go today. There needs to be an air-gap between systems being used to manage clients/customers and the MSP's day to day production systems.
Agreed. The MSP doesn't need to be connected to their customer 24x7.
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For the couple of sites I manage some stuff for, I have separate VMs (on my end) for each of them. Each VM has only the VPN client for the client I am connecting to.
Edit: Passwords are different for each VM, as well as each VPN connection as well.
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@dafyre said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
For the couple of sites I manage some stuff for, I have separate VMs (on my end) for each of them. Each VM has only the VPN client for the client I am connecting to.
Edit: Passwords are different for each VM, as well as each VPN connection as well.
Catch is, the VMs need to be accessed from a system that has nothing to do with day-to-day operations. None.
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@PhlipElder said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
@dafyre said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
For the couple of sites I manage some stuff for, I have separate VMs (on my end) for each of them. Each VM has only the VPN client for the client I am connecting to.
Edit: Passwords are different for each VM, as well as each VPN connection as well.
Catch is, the VMs need to be accessed from a system that has nothing to do with day-to-day operations. None.
I think I get your thinking... but for clarity's sake: Why?
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@dafyre said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
@PhlipElder said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
@dafyre said in Protek Support MSP Ransomware Hits Customers in Salt Lake City, Utah:
For the couple of sites I manage some stuff for, I have separate VMs (on my end) for each of them. Each VM has only the VPN client for the client I am connecting to.
Edit: Passwords are different for each VM, as well as each VPN connection as well.
Catch is, the VMs need to be accessed from a system that has nothing to do with day-to-day operations. None.
I think I get your thinking... but for clarity's sake: Why?
The whole point of a Privileged Access Workstation setup is to keep things separate.
As soon as I manage client systems from this system I'm sitting at there is no guarantee of protection.
The idea is to keep an air-gap in there.
I remember a story of a small MSP that not too long ago got compromised. As it turns out, the perps that got in on their system managed to get in to the balance of the MSP's clients. Why? They had saved the passwords in the RDP files for their client's servers. Duh.
All it takes is one absentminded click or drive-by that's completely shielded from us as we go about the day to day stuff and it's done. Game over. Say, "Bubbye".
