The FBI, the US federal police, could have helped Kaseya with a ransomware key weeks earlier, writes the Washington Post.
Some of the financial damage suffered from the major cyberattack on IT administrator Kaseya could have been avoided. The Washington Post newspaper reports that the FBI got hold of a ransomware key as early as June.
The government service is said to have broken into the Russian servers of ransomware gang REvil after the cyber attack on the network of JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company.
In the attack on Kaseya, the FBI then allegedly kept that ransomware key for another three weeks in an attempt to trap the gang. They wanted to avoid the gang being informed of the investigation, the newspaper writes.
Some 1,500 companies were involved in the attack, some of which paid ransoms to get their computer networks working again. Kaseya shared a universal “decryptor” with its customers at the end of July. The ransomware gang itself also seemed to have disappeared from the internet for a while.