Medusa attacks The Professional Liability Fund
Incident Date:
February 26, 2024
Overview
Title
Medusa attacks The Professional Liability Fund
Victim
The Professional Liability Fund
Attacker
Medusa
Location
First Reported
February 26, 2024
The Infamous Ransomware Medusa Locker Group Attacks
The Infamous Ransomware Medusa Locker Group has attacked The Professional Liability Fund. No further details have been disclosed. For over forty years, the Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund (PLF) has provided malpractice coverage to lawyers in private practice in the state of Oregon. The PLF is a unique organization within the United States. The Oregon State Bar Board of Governors created the PLF in 1977 pursuant to state statute (ORS 9.080) and with approval of the OSB membership. The PLF began operation on July 1, 1978, and has been the mandatory provider of primary malpractice coverage for Oregon lawyers since that date.
Introduction to Medusa Ransomware
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.
Recent Activities and Tactics
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. 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.
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.