Medusa attacks Sutton Dental Arts
Incident Date:
April 4, 2024
Overview
Title
Medusa attacks Sutton Dental Arts
Victim
Sutton Dental Arts
Attacker
Medusa
Location
First Reported
April 4, 2024
Ransomware Attack on Sutton Dental Arts by Medusa Gang
Ransomware gang Medusa has attacked Sutton Dental Arts and exfiltrated 20.2GB of data, including agreements, personal data, patient pictures, invoices, medical data, and more. A ransom of $100,000 has been demanded, with a deadline of 12 April. Sutton Dental Arts provides quality dental care, orthodontics, and restorative and cosmetic dentistry to patients. Its Roseburg offices serve residents of Sutherlin, Winston, and surrounding communities.
Medusa: A Growing Threat
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 as prevent 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 has been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appears 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.
Techniques 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 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, as well as public sector organizations. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption. Still, they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.
Recent Ransomware Attacks
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