Cyberattacks on Managed Service Providers are Soaring: Are Your Defenses Good Enough?

Cyberattacks on managed service providers have been increasing over the past few months and they are now a key target for hackers. If a hacker can gain access to the systems of a managed service provider, their remote administration tools can be used to launch attacks on their clients.

There have been several major cyberattacks on managed services providers in the past few weeks, with nation state-backed hacking groups targeting MSPs serving enterprises and ransomware gangs are conducting attacks on MSPs serving small and medium sized businesses.

Three major cyberattacks on managed service providers serving healthcare organizations in the United States have been reported in the past two months. All three have affected more than 100 healthcare clients and one impacted 400.

In late November, the Milwaukee-based managed IT service provider, Virtual Care Provider Inc., was attacked with Ryuk ransomware. The attack started on November 17, 2019 and affected all of its clients’ data. Around 110 nursing homes and acute care facilities were prevented them from accessing their patients’ medical records. The consequences for its clients were dire. Assisted living facilities and nursing homes were prevented from billing for Medicaid, which meant essential funding was not provided and nursing homes were prevented from ordering essential drugs for patients. Virtual Care Provider was issued with a $14 million ransom demand, which the company could not afford to pay. The managed service provider had around 20% of its services affected and had to rebuild around 100 servers.

The ransomware was deployed as a secondary payload by the TrickBot Trojan. TrickBot had been installed on its network 14 months previously via a malicious email attachment.

A few weeks later, a Colorado-based managed service provider serving dental practices was attacked with ransomware. Complete Technology Solutions was infected with a ransomware variant called Sodinokibi. First the MSP was attacked, then its remote administration tools were used deploy ransomware on the networks of more than 100 dental practices. A ransom demand of $700,000 was issued, which the MSP refused to pay. Its clients are now having to pay the attackers for the keys to decrypt their files. Only a few that had backups stored off the network were able to recover without paying the ransom.

This is the second such attack to affect a company serving the dental industry. The dental record backup service provider, PerCSoft, was also attacked with Sodinokibi ransomware. That attack affected approximately 400 dental practices. CyrusOne was also attacked with Sodinokibi ransomware and its managed services division and six of its clients were affected.

It is not only ransomware that is being used in the attacks. Nation-state threat groups such as APT10 are also targeting MSPs. Their aims are different. The attacks are being conducted to gain access to the intellectual property of their enterprise customers.

As cyberattacks on managed service providers increase, MSPs must ensure that they have adequate defenses in place to keep the hackers at bay. This is an area where TitanHQ can help. TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based email and web security solutions for managed service providers that serve the SMB market.

TitanHQ offers a trio of solutions for MSPs under the TitanShield program. SpamTitan email security is a powerful cloud-based solution that keeps inboxes free of spam, phishing emails, and malware. SpamTitan incorporates SPF and DMARC to block email impersonation attacks, uses dual antivirus engines to detect known malware threats, and heuristics and sandboxing to identify and block zero-day threats.

WebTitan Cloud is a 100% cloud-based DNS filtering solution that works seamlessly with SpamTitan to block web-based phishing attacks and malware downloads. The solution allows you to monitor and identify malicious threats in real time, and includes AI-driven protection against active and emerging phishing URLs, including zero-minute threats.

The third solution is ArcTitan, a cloud-based email archiving solution that provides protection against data loss and helps MSPs and their clients meet their compliance obligations. ArcTitan serves as a black box flight recorder for email and stores email data securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3. When emails need to be searched and recovered, the searches are lightning fast. ArcTitan can search up to 30 million emails a second.

ArcTitan has recently been moved to a brand new system, with the service delivered as a highly available, self-healing horizontally scaled Kubernetes cluster. Within that cluster are many different components working in harmony together, but independently. Should any component go down, that component can be taken offline and repaired with no impact on the others, ensuring a much more reliable service with minimal or no disruption during an outage. With ArcTitan, email is protected from cyberattacks.

These solutions are not only an ideal for improving the security posture of MSP clients, they can help to ensure that MSP systems are protected from attack. All TitanHQ solutions are quick and easy to implement, have a low management overhead, and are API-driven so they can easily be incorporated into MSP’s remote management and monitoring systems.

To find out more about the TitanShield program for managed service providers and to discover how TitanHQ’s cybersecurity solutions can improve yours and your clients’ security posture, give the TitanHQ channel team a call today.