Situation
NCC Group provided extensive support to a charity organization after it fell victim to a ransomware attack.
The support consisted of a full investigation into the root cause of the attack and remediation of the organization’s vulnerabilities to protect the organization against attacks in the future. NCC Group’s support, guidance, and expertise enabled the organization to strengthen its security posture and save valuable time and resources in the process.
At a Glance
Organization: Charity Organization
Industry: Charity
Challenge: Providing support for a charity after it fell victim to a ransomware attack
Solution: The extent of the attack was ascertained, with key information identified and systems rebuilt to ensure services could be resumed
Result: Vulnerabilities were rectified, saving the organization resources and time in the process
Challenge
After falling victim to the ransomware attack, the charity enlisted NCC Group to investigate the incident, assist it in reasserting control of its estate, and restore its critical services. The organization also wanted to strengthen its security capabilities to protect itself against similar attacks going forward.
The organization severely lacked resources that it could allocate to cyber security, and its small IT team was primarily focused on patching vulnerabilities as and when they occurred. This shortage, combined with an ongoing move to the cloud, meant that the charity did not have the time or the opportunity to perform or invest in necessary security upgrades and protections.
Solution
NCC Group performed two work streams in parallel, with its Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) establishing the extent of the attack. Meanwhile, its Remediate team liaised with key stakeholders at the organization to identify the information that was held on its estate, what systems were currently in place and which assets were mission-critical.
The team used this information to rebuild the charity’s security infrastructure, enabling it to resume operations and ensuring that it could handle any potential breaches in the future. During the scoping exercise, NCC Group identified that the organization was using single-factor authentication (SFA) for external services.
By collaborating with the CIRT team’s investigation, it identified that the successful attack vector originated from credential stuffing from public breach data. As such, the team rapidly rebuilt the charity’s finance system onto a cloud-based platform based on Microsoft Azure and secured it with multi-factor authentication and conditional access.
The team also helped the charity to rebuild its on-premise domain controllers to operate wider services and implement group policy server hardening to further bolster its security controls. This was combined with a full password reset program with proactive auditing and filtering against known breached accounts.
Finally, the NCC Group Remediate team assisted the charity with setting its network up to operate via a cloud-based platform and through ExpressRoute, allowing its users to seamlessly access their internal networks.
Result
In addition to the ransomware attack being fully investigated and handled by NCC Group’s CIRT, the Remediate team was able to rectify many of the vulnerabilities that were illuminated by the attack in the first place. The project also saved the organization a considerable amount of expenditure in both resources and time.
This was particularly notable as the charity was initially considering outsourcing to one of its suppliers. It transpired that this supplier would have continued to use SFA as a security measure, which would have exacerbated one of the major vulnerabilities which led to the ransomware attack in the first place.
NCC Group has become a trusted advisor to the organization and continues to work with it, having recently rolled out an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capability across its estate.
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