US President Joe Biden on Saturday he’s unsure if the Russian government is involved in Friday’s ransomware attack against a software management company Kaseya but warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the US “will respond” if the Motherland was behind the mass cyberattack that hit at least 200 companies at the start of the Independence Day weekend.
Clarifying that he hasn’t spoken directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the latest cyber issues, Biden said the initial thinking was it was not the Russian government, but they’re not sure yet.
Biden allegedly ordered full investigation of the incident allocating resources of the federal government while the FBI is looking into the circumstances of Kaseya’s attack in coordination with the company and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
FBI encouraged all who might be affected to employ the recommended mitigations and for users to follow Kaseya’s guidance to shut down VSA servers immediately, expressed its readiness to assist any impacted entities.
Kaseya, who has taken their cloud service offline, initially said 200 companies were affected, but later changed that to a small number with media reporting that least eight companies have been affected, and some were asked for $5 million in ransom.
According to John Hammond of the cybersecurity firm Huntress Labs, the attack affected thousands of computers. Huntress said that earlier in the week its team had tracked a critical ransomware incident affecting MSPs and their customers, which appears to be a Kaseya VSA supply chain attack .
US researchers says the Kaseya hack seemed to be the work of REvil, a group many US researchers have described as Russian-speaking, and the victims of the attacks have reportedly received demands for some $45,000 in Monero cryptocurrency.
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