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There is an old saying that says, when you can no longer do, you teach. This might be a relatively true axiom in the regular world, but in the world of cybercrime it is certainly not what you find happening. Instead, we tend to see that when organized groups no longer want the headache and hassle of doing the heavy lifting for attacks, they just build a platform to sell their tools to others. We have seen ransomware as a service, malware as a service, malvertising as a service, and even phishing as a service.

Yesterday we reported on a ransomware attack that impacted PC and component manufacturer MSI. When they, MSI, disclosed the attack they claimed there was no significant impact, but failed to consider that most, if not all, modern ransomware attacks also incorporate exfiltration techniques to ensure a ransom is paid. This this case, the group Money Message had exfiltrated data a claimed 1.5TB of data that included firmware, source code, and databases. This sounds a bit significant at this point.

In January of 2023 the Print Management Software company PaperCut was advised of two Remote Code Execution (RCE) bugs. These bugs were in their PaperCut MF and PaperCut NG software products. PaperCut worked with the group that identified the bugs, TrendMicro, to develop a patch prior to disclosure of the flaw. The patch was made available to PaperCut clients on March 8th and the vulnerability was disclosed on April 20th. However, as is the case with things like this, the patches were not rolled out as one would have hoped.

Updated May-08-2023 with statement from Intel
Back in early April MSI, a popular PC and PC component maker, disclosed that it had a security incident. They stated that they quickly rolled out their Incident Response Team and enacted their recovery procedures (IR and BC/DR plans). Not much was known about the attack at the time, including when the incident happened, just that the disclosure was made to the relevant authorities.