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Fidelity—the nation’s largest title insurance company—suffered "The Fidelity Breach," a severe ransomware attack on Nov. 22, causing a system-wide outage disrupting mortgage, escrow and 1031 processes. It caused panic among customers.
Cardinal Title is an independent, custom, commercial agent. It is organized to to bring our customers the benefits of multi-underwriter coverages. We mitigate the risk of exposure to a monoline insurer such as the Fidelity breach. Cardinal Title has a direct, personal relationship with its customers. Our customers are not exposed to the hazard of dealing with large monoline bureaucracies, unaccountable and automated national firms.
Data Threat: AlphV/Black Cat
A gang called AlphV/Black Cat took responsibility for the Fidelity attack, so we did a little research. AlphV/Black Cat emerged in November 2021, and it is believed to be associated with other advanced-persistent threats such as those named Conti, DarkSide, Revil and BlackMatter.
The Black Cat ransomware, among other threats, does a triple-extortion, which involves data encryption, data theft and distributed denial-of-service attacks. When it attacks a system, it also provides its malware to its affiliates who target victims and collect ransom payments. Black Cat also has a data leak site that puts pressure on victims to pay the ransom. The group's high-profile and innovative tactics in many fields have cybersecurity experts highly concerned.
Data security experts offer the following mitigation strategies:
- Train employees to be aware of AlphV/Black Cat and to use critical thinking before clicking a bait link.
- Use strong password policies and multi-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access to your systems.
- Enact vulnerability scanning and patching to address known weaknesses in systems and software.
- Employ endpoint security solutions to detect and block malware.
- Be vigilant about data backups to enable recovery in case of an attack.
- Create incident response plans to effectively manage ransomware attacks.
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