Description

MoneyGram, a leading payment and money transfer platform, has confirmed that a recent cyberattack was not caused by ransomware. The attack, which occurred on September 20, resulted in a five-day outage, leaving customers unable to access and transfer their money. Despite initial suspicions of a ransomware attack, MoneyGram's investigation, conducted in collaboration with CrowdStrike, law enforcement, and other cybersecurity experts, found no evidence to support this claim. The breach, which was initially detected on September 17, was contained by taking systems offline. MoneyGram has since restored its systems, taking extensive precautionary measures to ensure the security of its network. The company has confirmed that corporate systems were breached, but the attack did not impact its agents' systems. According to a source familiar with the incident, the attackers gained access to MoneyGram's network through a social engineering attack on the company's internal help desk, using an employee's credentials to target employee information in the company's Windows Active Directory Services. The attack bears similarities to those conducted by the Scattered Spider hacker collective, known for their sophisticated social engineering tactics. In a recent advisory, Microsoft, the FBI/CISA, and Mandiant warned about the group's tactics and provided guidance on how to defend against them. While MoneyGram has not publicly attributed the attack to any particular threat actor, the incident highlights the importance of robust cybersecurity measures and vigilance in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats.