"The development comes after Wyden's office obtained new information from healthcare system Ascension, which suffered a crippling ransomware attack last year, resulting in the theft of personal and medical information associated with nearly 5.6 million individuals. The ransomware attack, which also disrupted access to electronic health records, was attributed to a ransomware group known as Black Basta. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the breach has been ranked as the third-largest healthcare-related incident over the past year."
"According to the senator's office, the breach occurred when a contractor clicked on a malicious link after conducting a web search on Microsoft's Bing search engine, causing their system to be infected with malware. Subsequently, the attackers leveraged "dangerously insecure default settings" on Microsoft software to obtain elevated access to the most sensitive parts of Ascension's network. This involved the use of a technique called Kerberoasting that targets the Kerberos authentication protocol to extract encrypted service account credentials from Active Directory."
Senator Ron Wyden called for an FTC probe into Microsoft for alleged gross cybersecurity negligence that enabled ransomware attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, including healthcare. Ascension suffered a ransomware incident that stole personal and medical data for nearly 5.6 million individuals and disrupted electronic health records, with attribution to the Black Basta group. The breach began after a contractor clicked a malicious Bing search result, then attackers exploited insecure default Microsoft settings to escalate privileges. Attackers used Kerberoasting against Kerberos and exploited legacy RC4 support in defaults. Wyden warned that negligent security plus market dominance poses a national security threat and urged accountability.
Read at The Hacker News
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