Ransomware Attacks – Nagios Can Improve Your Response to Reduce the Impact
Earlier in 2024 one of the main providers of DMS (Dealer Management Services) software for car dealerships across the US was the target of a ransomware attack. Their software helps dealerships manage everything such as car sales, insurance, financing, and service repairs. Personal information including names, addresses, vehicle identification numbers, and social security numbers were collected as a result. According to a Fox Business article, the several days outage of their software services cost dealerships upwards of $1 billion, as dealership operations such as sales were abruptly halted.
Although Nagios may not outright prevent a ransomware attack such as this, it can play a crucial role in detecting, mitigating, and responding to the attack to minimize its impact.
So, how could Nagios have helped minimize the impact of a ransomware attack?
Our flagship monitoring tool, Nagios XI, offers robust monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities, which would have been valuable for improving visibility into the software company’s infrastructure. This added visibility could have helped in identifying signs of compromise, giving them the ability to act before the ransomware attack escalated.
Nagios XI can monitor and alert on practically anything with an IP, but XI’s ability to excel at monitoring the availability and health of key infrastructure components such as disk usage would have helped considerably in this case. In the event of a ransomware attack, the attacker is often trying to collect as much data as possible before getting caught. This would likely cause a large spike in disk usage which can trigger an alert and notification to allow you to investigate the anomaly.
By integrating with and leveraging the functionality of our log monitoring solution, Nagios Log Server, XI can expand its ability to detect an attack such as this. Nagios Log Server can detect and alert when an unusually high number of failed login attempts happen on critical systems, such as servers or applications storing sensitive customer data. This can often be a sign of attempted credential stuffing or a brute force attack. If critical systems were compromised, an alert can be set up to trigger an automated scripted action within XI utilizing an “event handler” to isolate or shut down affected systems to limit the damage while the security team investigates.
Additionally, XI’s integration with Active Directory allows Admins to track changes to user accounts (e.g., the creation of new accounts, modification of permissions, or activation of dormant accounts) and provide alerts for unusual or unauthorized actions. Nagios XI can send detailed alerts with diagnostic information to a security team or integrate with a ticketing system (e.g., ServiceNow) to automatically open an incident response workflow. Integrations such as this could have given their security team a time advantage, allowing them to respond more quickly to the incident at hand.
Final Thoughts
In short, with its ability to monitor infrastructure health, identify suspicious patterns, and potentially trigger automated responses, Nagios solutions can provide organizations the visibility that is needed to limit the impact of attacks such as this by alerting them to unusual activity and allowing them to respond more effectively. Every second counts when a ransomware attack or hack occurs. By adding Nagios solutions into their broader cyber security strategy, organizations can bolster their ability to detect and react to these types of situations.
To learn more about how you can utilize Nagios XI, Nagios Log Server, and the rest of our monitoring suite to provide comprehensive insight into your infrastructure as a whole, there is a great article on a holistic approach to monitoring with Nagios you can find here: Get Holistic with 4 Nagios Solutions. If you are interested in trying out these solutions for yourself, you can start your journey out at our Nagios Products Page.
