RANSOMWARE ATTACK DAMAGE NOT AS BIG AS FEARED: BIDEN

President Joe Biden said Tuesday (Wednesday, July 7, 2021, in Manila) that damage to US businesses in the biggest ransomware attack on record appears minimal, though information remained incomplete.

The company whose software was exploited said fewer than 1,500 businesses worldwide appeared compromised but cybersecurity experts caution that the incident isn’t over, Frank Bajak and Zeke Miller reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Also Tuesday, a security researcher who chatted online with representatives of the Russia-linked REvil gang behind the attack said they claimed to have stolen data from hundreds of companies, but offered no evidence.

Answering a reporter’s question at a vaccine-related White House event, Biden said his national security team had updated him Tuesday morning on the attack, which exploited a powerful remote-management tool run by Miami-based software firm Kaseya in what is known as a supply-chain attack.

“It appears to have caused minimal damage to US businesses but we’re still gathering information,” Biden said. “And I’m going to have more to say about this in the next several days.”

An official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), speaking on condition they are not further identified, said no federal agencies or critical infrastructure appear to have been impacted.

On Wednesday, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will lead an interagency meeting to discuss the administration’s efforts to counter ransomware. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki held out the prospect of retaliatory action.

What Biden told President Vladimir Putin in Geneva last month still holds, she said: “If the Russian government cannot or will not take action against criminal actors residing in Russia, we will take action or reserve the right to take action on our own.” What sort of action that would be is unclear.

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