Vice Society Claims Ransomware Attack Against University of Duisburg-Essen

The danger actor Vice Modern society has claimed obligation for the ransomware attack towards the College of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in November 2022 and has reportedly printed some stolen data on the dark web.

UDE manufactured the announcement in excess of the weekend, expressing the facts publication resulted from the university not complying with the attackers’ ransom calls for.

At the exact time, the university clarified that all its security steps were based on the Federal Workplace for Information and facts Security (BSI) specifications and the BSI IT baseline protection methodology.

“The truth that the attackers nevertheless managed to extract data and make ransom calls for once once again illustrates the organization’s highly experienced method and prison intent,” the college claimed. 

UDE extra that straight away following the attack was learned, the university shut down the complete IT infrastructure and disconnected it from the network. Many thanks to this, the legal firm would have only acquired a constrained sum of knowledge.

“The printed data is at present being evaluated,” spelled out UDE. “If the breach has an effect on persons or institutions, they will be informed as soon as doable.”

According to Raj Samani, SVP main scientist at Rapid7, it is admirable that UDE did not spend the ransom demanded by Vice Modern society.

“As properly as not shelling out ransoms, companies should put into action systems and security controls that really don’t just detect possible intrusion or lateral movement but also secure info need to the threat not be eliminated before, these types of as [through] the use of file encryption,” Samani advised Infosecurity.

This is not Vice Society’s to start with ransomware attack on the schooling sector. In 2022, the team qualified the Cincinnati State Technological and Neighborhood Higher education, the Health-related College of Innsbruck and the Los Angeles Unified University District.

“Training was the most hugely specific vertical when it arrived to publicly disclosed ransomware attacks in 2022, with Vice Society proclaiming the the greater part of those people incidents,” described BlackFog CEO Darren Williams.

“When it arrived to facts exfiltration, around 50% of these incidents involved info exfiltration, despite the fact that we assume this number to increase as details breaches are claimed numerous months later.”

Vice Modern society is also thought to be driving a recent leak of private knowledge from 14 UK schools.

Some parts of this write-up are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com