A cybercrime group has leaked files stolen earlier this year from Cisco, but the networking giant stands by its initial assessment of the incident and says there is no impact to its business.
Cisco admitted on August 10 that it had detected a security breach on May 24. The admission was prompted by a ransomware group named Yanluowang claiming to have obtained gigabytes of information and publishing a list of files allegedly stolen from Cisco.
The hackers have now published the actual files stolen from Cisco and the company has confirmed that they originated from its systems.
“The content of these files match what we already identified and disclosed,” Cisco said in an update shared on Sunday. “Our previous analysis of this incident remains unchanged—we continue to see no impact to our business, including Cisco products or services, sensitive customer data or sensitive employee information, intellectual property, or supply chain operations.”
In August, Cisco attributed the attack to an initial access broker with ties to the Russia-linked threat actor UNC2447, the Lapsus$ gang, and the Yanluowang ransomware group.
The company said the attacker had targeted one of its employees. It has claimed that only non-sensitive files stored in a Box account and employee authentication data from Active Directory were stolen.
The hackers initially obtained the employee’s Cisco credentials and then used social engineering and other methods to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and obtain additional information.
Once initial access was achieved, they started dropping post-exploitation and remote access tools, escalated privileges, created backdoors, and moved laterally within the network.
File-encrypting ransomware was not deployed in the attack and while the threat actor did send emails to Cisco executives after the breach was discovered, it did not make specific threats or extortion demands.
The Yanluowang file-encrypting ransomware emerged in 2021 and it has been used to target organizations around the world, including financial corporations in the United States.
Related: Ransomware Group Threatens to Leak Data Stolen From Security Firm Entrust
Related: Swissport Investigating Ransomware Group’s Data Leak Claims
Related: Ransomware Gang Threatens to Leak Files Stolen From Tire Giant Bridgestone
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Exploitation of Recent Fortinet Zero-Day Linked to Chinese Cyberspies
- Mozilla Patches High-Severity Vulnerabilities With Release of Firefox 111
- Microsoft: 17 European Nations Targeted by Russia in 2023 as Espionage Ramping Up
- Cybercriminals, APT Exploited Telerik Vulnerability in Attacks on US Government Agency
- US Charges Two Men Over Use of Hacked Law Enforcement Database for Doxing
- Chinese Cyberspies Hacked DLP Company Serving Military, Government Orgs
Latest News
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- NBA Notifying Individuals of Data Breach at Mailing Services Provider
- Adobe Acrobat Sign Abused to Distribute Malware
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Huawei Has Replaced Thousands of US-Banned Parts With Chinese Versions: Founder
- Latitude Financial Services Data Breach Impacts 300,000 Customers
- US Government Warns Organizations of LockBit 3.0 Ransomware Attacks
- New ‘Trigona’ Ransomware Targets US, Europe, Australia
