Have you heard of the hacking group known as FIN7? Well, if you haven’t this blog will educate you on the growing highlights and illustrate the gap that is between cyber criminals and the good people on the other side, the business people, governments, schools, all the people out there that you hear about getting hacked. It's getting scary out there! Businesses will be in trouble, and you need to learn how to protect yourselves the right way. So let's get into it.
FIN7 hacking group has been around for a long time. Honestly, they're one of the most prolific hacking groups out there, but they're changing up their tactics. Hopefully, people reading this can start to understand what's coming on the horizon and what they have start to do to protect themselves, whether it's from a regulation standpoint or whether it's going to come from your cyber insurance company telling you that you're not going to have cyber insurance, unless you do X, Y, and Z.
Many people are probably already seeing a lot about multi-factor authentication in their language. At Xact IT we have a lot of companies calling us to get help with just MFA because that's what their cyber insurance policy is telling them to do. But unfortunately, MFA is not the only thing that you should be doing. There are lots of things that you need to be doing correctly in order to fend off the threat from these cyber criminals, like FIN7.
Cyber experts want to educate you on what this group has been up to, how they've been kind of retooling and what you need to start doing to prepare for these groups who are now kind of ratcheting up what they can do in this war against cyber criminals and against your own businesses.
So, the number one objective the FIN7 group has focused on is business email compromise and point of sale system compromise because their main goal was to steal information, steal credit card data, steal financial information for the most part. Also, number two, is this group has been tied to ransomware groups like R-Evil and Dark Matter.
So, what is happening here you may ask? Cyber experts are discovering that they are putting technology together, malware, in a chock-full of ways which could allow them to maintain their access or regain it if they lose it, which is really scary if you're a cyber defender or if you're somebody who has a business and does nothing at all. If this does happen it can cause a big gap in your business and you have no way of telling or knowing whether one of these threat actors is in your network and lurking around, spying around, looking for information, looking for ways that they can attack. This is what they do.
Although, what has happened in the past is they create a vector, which is a way for them to get in. Then once they're in, they're kind of looking around to figure out, hey, where else can I go? Or how can I deploy ransomware? This is what they are doing now by putting other tools in place. So, if you find them in your network and kick them out or remove the one vector that they used to get in, they already set up three or four more back doors and other ways that they can get in.
Another tactic they are using is their toolset that they put on your network once they're in there to discover all the different ways that they can make you more vulnerable. For example, they use things that you're running, or collect data, passwords on your employees. All of these are being built in a tool that they're downloading.
Quite frankly, the way that they're getting onto your network and the way that they're downloading it is quite slick too, because they're using a Java-based program that's very lightweight and very easy to get onto a system and very difficult to detect. Then, things are brought onto the network and downloaded which makes it harder to detect. Also, these tools sit there and don't do anything until they need them, which is harder to detect. To top it all off, they're building self-destruct mechanisms. So, when they think they're caught, it's quickly able to remove itself and obfuscate itself from anybody finding out they were there or finding their ways in.
So, these hackers are not stopping where they are today. They're building bigger, better, more slick tools, more tools that are harder to find, or harder to track, or harder to look into after the fact. This is why you can't just look at cybersecurity as, okay, we'll just do the next thing that our cyber insurance company tells us to do because the flavor of the month right now or the flavor of the year is multifactor authentication, which you probably should have been doing five years ago. Most companies are getting on board with that now.
The place you really need to be in your business and how you prevent groups like FIN7 from ruining your day and your business is you put these detection mechanisms in place, right? There can be a lot of different ways that you do detection. You can look for anomalies in a lot of different ways. You can do threat hunting in a lot of different ways. You can check out what things they're doing on the computers and investigate and analyze those things and make sure that they're legitimate things that are running in your environment and not something that a group like FIN7 put on into your network.
Businesses need to get to the point where they're following a framework. If you follow the NIST cybersecurity framework, one of the sections in that framework is the detection. How are you going to detect? Right? Then, when you do detect, the next one is how are you going to respond? Not a lot of people, not a lot of businesses are aware of this, all the things that are involved. That's why Xact IT Solutions urges you to call a cybersecurity professional and get this stuff taken care of as soon as possible.
So, let's get these things in place. Businesses are going to get hacked throughout 2022, and in 2023, it's not going to get easier and it's not going to get any prettier. It's going to get uglier. These attacks are going to start happening to small businesses more and more and more, as they realize that they can make money there. Right now, it's easy for them to make money off of major companies and get paid millions of dollars but these guys are refining their processes and they're coming after the middle market and they're coming after the small businesses. It might not seem as prevalent to you right now, and you might not have been affected, and you might not know somebody who is attacked, but cyber experts guarantee you, by the end of this year, you will.
Talk to a cybersecurity professional about getting a framework put in place, because that's truly the only way you're going to stop this. Putting your password manager on, putting your multifactor authentication on, yes, that's part of it, but these aren't the only things you should be doing.