BiahLian attacks On Q Financial
Incident Date:
April 6, 2024
Overview
Title
BiahLian attacks On Q Financial
Victim
On Q Financial
Attacker
Bianlian
Location
First Reported
April 6, 2024
The BianLian Ransomware Group's Attack on On Q Financial
The BianLian ransomware group has attacked On Q Financial. It’s unclear what the impacts of the breach are. On Q Financial is a known mortgage company that offers home financing and refinancing options. It takes a consultative approach to mortgage financing, considering its client's short and long-term financial goals when offering guidance to their selection of a mortgage product.
The Evolution of BianLian
The BianLian data extortion group first emerged in June 2022 as a typical RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) provider with Golang-based ransomware until a decrypter was released. In early 2023, they appeared to have abandoned the ransomware payload portion of attacks in favor of less complicated data exfiltration and extortion attacks. This shows how successful the double extortion strategy is for ransomware groups, and we will likely see more groups join the likes of BianLian (and Karakurt before them).
Techniques and Targets
BianLian leverages open-source tooling and command-line scripts to engage in credential harvesting and data exfiltration. BianLian increased attack volumes as they moved away from deploying ransomware payloads in favor of pure data extortion attacks, making them one of the more prominent groups in Q1-2023, although they still lagging far behind leaders.
It is unclear how much BianLian typically requests for a ransom amount or if they are keen to negotiate the demand down. BianLian successfully attacked several high-profile organizations before a free decryption tool was released to help victims recover files encrypted by ransomware. The group abandoned the RaaS model in favor of pure data extortion attacks where data is exfiltrated and ransom demand issued, but no ransomware is deployed.
BianLian has been observed deploying a custom Go-based backdoor for remote access. BianLian uses PowerShell and Windows Command Shell to bypass and evade security solutions. BianLian primarily targets financial institutions, healthcare, manufacturing, education, entertainment, and energy sectors by leveraging compromised Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials. Almost exclusively a data extortion attack group now, it is rarely observed deploying ransomware payloads.
Recent Ransomware Attacks
The Recent Ransomware Attacks (RRA) site acts as a watchtower, providing you with near real-time ransomware tracking of attacks, groups and their victims. Given threat actors’ overarching, lucrative success so far, ransomware attacks have become the most ubiquitous, and financially and informationally impactful cyber threat to businesses and organizations today.
The site’s data is generated based on hosting choices of real-world threat actors, and a handful of other trackers. While sanitization efforts have been taken, we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy of the data. Attack updates will be made as source data is reported by reputable sources. By viewing, accessing, or using RRA you acknowledge you are doing so at your own risk.