Weekend Cyberattack May Not Be Over, Report Says

President Joe Biden has said the U.S. appears to have avoided much damage to businesses in the recent ransomware attack, which was the biggest on record, the Associated Press (AP) wrote Tuesday (July 6).

The company that saw the software breach affected less than 1,500 companies globally.

The attack on Friday was able to exploit a powerful remote management tool, which was operated by Miami’s Kaseya. That was used to facilitate a supply chain attack. The attack, according to the AP, was responsible for doing damage to businesses in at least 17 countries and shuttering many supermarkets in the Swedish Coop chain by breaking down cash registers last weekend.

But White House press secretary Jen Psaki thought there might be the chance of retaliatory attacks against possible Russian participators — though there were no specifics on what this might entail, AP wrote. Biden has said numerous times that he believes the Kremlin has responsibility in giving safe harbor to cybercriminals.

Kaseya now said it thinks only around 800 to 1,500 of the 800,000 to 1,000,000 users of its software were affected by the breach.

But cybersecurity experts aren’t so sure, thinking Kaseya can’t know at this point exactly how its services were impacted on the whole. According to experts, some people might only discover it upon returning to work on Tuesday (July 6).

PYMNTS wrote that those affected were primarily customers of Kaseya’s customers, and so it became more difficult to look at the exact fallout of what happened.

The hackers claiming responsibility for the shutdowns had demanded a $70 million ransom to restore the businesses’ data.

Kaseya’s specialty involves working with IT tools for outsourcing shops, including those companies that normally work in the back office for smaller businesses. The attack was able to undo a large chunk of what Kaseya had thus far accomplished, and many of the directly affected companies were business like dentist offices or accountants.