Agencies alert of threat by new Play ransomware group

The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Australian Cyber Security Centre Dec. 18 released a warning about actions and tactics used by the Play ransomware group. The group has impacted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure in North America, South America and Europe since 2022, in addition to incidents in Australia in April and November this year. 

The cyber threat actors are presumed to be a closed group, designed to “guarantee the secrecy of deals,” according to a statement on the group’s data leak website. Play ransomware actors use a double-extortion model, which encrypts systems after exfiltrating data; their ransom notes do not include an initial ransom demand or payment instructions, rather, victims are instructed to contact the threat actors via email. 

John Riggi, AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, said, “This ransomware group, like many others, has been observed to use compromised valid accounts to gain initial access through external-facing services such as Remote Desktop Protocol and virtual private networks. Once inside the network, they continue to exploit a variety of vulnerabilities in third-party software and chain them together to move laterally across an organization’s network, ultimately compromising unsecured administrative accounts. It is recommended that organizations apply the alert’s cited mitigations to limit potential hackers’ use of common system and network discovery techniques to reduce the risk of high-impact ransomware attacks.” 

For more information on this or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org. For the latest cyber and risk resources and threat intelligence, visit aha.org/cybersecurity.