Medusa Ransomware Group's Attack on Kansas City Area Transportation Authority

Medusa ransomware group claimed an attack on the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. According to the company's announcement "All service is operating, including fixed-route buses, Freedom and Freedom-On-Demand paratransit service. The primary customer impact is that regional RideKC call centers cannot receive calls, nor can any KCATA landline." KCATA is a bi-state public transit agency serving seven counties of Missouri and Kansas, operating 78 bus routes and 6 MetroFlex routes using a fleet of 300 buses. The company reports that 10.5 million people use their services in a year.

The Medusa Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS)

The Medusa is a RaaS that made its debut in the summer of 2021 and has evolved to be one of the more active RaaS platforms. Attack volumes were inconsistent in the first half of 2023 with a resurgence of attack activity in the last half of 2023. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software as well preventing recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting VSS Shadow Copies to thwart encryption rollback.

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and have been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appear to have waned somewhat in the second quarter. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay.

Method of Attack and Targets

The Medusa RaaS operation (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or through malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments (there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.)

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and public sector organizations too. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, but they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.