The recent cyberattack on Change Healthcare, crippling the nation’s largest healthcare payment system, underscores the dangers of inadequate vulnerability management. UnitedHealth, the parent company for Change Healthcare, confirmed that BlackCat (also known as ALPHV), a prolific ransomware group responsible for a string of high-profile attacks, is behind this breach.
What to know about ALPHV/BlackCat
BlackCat is notoriously opportunistic and aggressive. They target organizations across various sectors and leverage diverse attack vectors, particularly:
- Unpatched Vulnerabilities: ALPHV/BlackCat is notorious for exploiting known vulnerabilities, including the ScreenConnect auth bypass flaw (CVE-2024-1709). The FBI, CISA, and HHS released a joint advisory recently noting how the cybercriminal gang has been utilizing this particular vulnerability.
- Security Exposures or Misconfigurations: Weak configurations and permissions can open the door for ALPHV/BlackCat to infiltrate networks.
- Zero-day Exploits: These attackers have also been known to capitalize on newly discovered vulnerabilities for which patches are unavailable.
What to do to protect your enterprise
In light of this escalating threat, IT and security operations teams must adopt proactive defense strategies:
- Embrace Automated Patch Management: Manually patching systems is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Automating patch deployment ensures critical updates are applied quickly and consistently, minimizing the window of vulnerability attackers can exploit.
- Prioritize Vulnerability Scanning: Continuous vulnerability scans illuminate security weaknesses. Coupled with a risk-based, contextualized prioritization system, vulnerability scanning can guide remediation efforts. This enables IT operations teams to focus on vulnerabilities with high potential for exploitation.
- Elevate Vulnerability Remediation: Scanning for missing patches, security vulnerabilities, or exposures is not enough. Visibility without action does not reduce cyber risk. Enterprises need to elevate vulnerability remediation to a critical and strategic effort. Acting swiftly to either patch systems, address configuration issues, or eliminate exposures must be part of the vulnerability management lifecycle.
Implementing these best practices drastically reduces your attack surface, making it significantly harder for cybercriminals like ALPHV/BlackCat and others cyber gangs to succeed.
Syxsense understands the complexities of vulnerability management. Our automated platform provides:
- Automated patch deployment across operating systems and applications.
- Real-time insight into your vulnerability risk posture with risk-based prioritization of vulnerabilities.
- Automated, bulk vulnerability remediations to ensure your organization is more secure.
Want to transform your security posture? Schedule a Syxsense demo and discover how we can help you outpace evolving threats.
