Ransomware Group Leaks Files Stolen From Cisco

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.

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