<story><title>Up to 1,500 businesses affected by ransomware attack, Kaseya CEO says</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-demand-70-million-liberate-data-held-by-companies-hit-mass-cyberattack-2021-07-05/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t one of the main problems with ransomware centralised and locked down IT administration? I mean if the computers were not tied together so tightly the effects would be isolated. Instead there is a admin account encrypting all the machines HDs remotely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javajosh</author><text>Yes, but centralization is a symptom of something deeper: incumbent business interests with top-down power structures  actively &lt;i&gt;disincentivize&lt;/i&gt; the holistic, creative, critical thinking required to mount a meaningful distributed cyber-defense, and &lt;i&gt;incentivize&lt;/i&gt; CYA approaches which leads to weaker centralized solutions. &amp;quot;Well, we spent $10M on defense - put some appliances in a NOC, paid contractors, gave our CTO a bonus - what more could we do?&amp;quot; Ultimately the legal system will accept this as a valid excuse. Whereas, if you take more holistic steps, embrace distributed responsibility and action, incentivize awareness of threats and threat-modeling, and get sued as liable, a judge could very well say, &amp;quot;But you didn&amp;#x27;t spend a significant chunk of your revenue to build [out the same kind of solutions I&amp;#x27;m used to seeing in cases like this]? Negligence!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;When ignorance becomes so widespread that it is enforced by law, and wise action is actively punished, and one cannot really blame rational actors for taking the CYA approach. One can hope that some of them take a principled stand and the risk of punishment to do more; alternatively, we can expect to collapse and be replaced by a smarter, if more brutal regime. One way or another, the bleeding always stops.</text></comment>
<story><title>Up to 1,500 businesses affected by ransomware attack, Kaseya CEO says</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-demand-70-million-liberate-data-held-by-companies-hit-mass-cyberattack-2021-07-05/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t one of the main problems with ransomware centralised and locked down IT administration? I mean if the computers were not tied together so tightly the effects would be isolated. Instead there is a admin account encrypting all the machines HDs remotely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ok123456</author><text>Yes. It&amp;#x27;s much of the security theater that has led to the state of things. Third-party administration and monitoring agents like Solarwinds are an incredible attack vector.&lt;p&gt;A lot of the &amp;quot;security best practices&amp;quot; just become checklists of what people thought were good ideas 20 years ago and enforced by auditors that only know how to check boxes.</text></comment>