BianLian attacks Mayer Antonellis Jachowicz & Haranas, LLP
Incident Date:
March 19, 2024
Overview
Title
BianLian attacks Mayer Antonellis Jachowicz & Haranas, LLP
Victim
Mayer Antonellis Jachowicz & Haranas, LLP
Attacker
Bianlian
Location
First Reported
March 19, 2024
Ransomware Group BianLian's Recent Attack
Ransomware group BianLian has attacked Mayer Antonellis Jachowicz & Haranas, LLP, although no other details are available. Mayer Antonellis Jachowicz & Haranas, LLP is a law firm that provides various legal services. The firm represents businesses, individuals, banking institutions, and others in a wide variety of legal matters. It has experienced lawyers that specialize in Massachusetts business law, divorce law, and real estate law.
BianLian's Evolution
BianLian is not a traditional RaaS. They first emerged in June 2022 as a typical RaaS provider with Golang-based ransomware until a decrypter was released. In early 2023, they appear 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 have 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 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, rarely observed deploying ransomware payloads.
Recent Ransomware Attacks
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