21 July 2021, Kathmandu
A highly sophisticated ransomware incident at Cloudstar disrupts real estate. A highly sophisticated ransomware attack at Cloudstar, a cloud hosting service and managed service provider for varied real estate, has played havoc with the activities of many companies.
Cloudstar is primarily famous in the mortgage, title insurance, real estate, legal, finance, and local government sector, where it offers services like virtual desktop hosting, software-as-service facilities, and other managed cloud infrastructure, which support many organizations’ IT infrastructure. On July 16 July, Cloudstar, the Florida-based company publicized that it was the victim of a highly complicated ransomware attack that forced it to take down a huge of its services.
According to industry experts, the attack and ensuing obstruction of Cloudstar’s system could create a national emergency on Monday because the company provides technology for hundreds of title companies and lenders.
With the anomaly of its encrypted email service, Cloudstar said during a standing page today that the bulk of its infrastructure continues to be down three days after the attack.
The name of the ransomware gang behind the attack wasn’t mentioned but the company had already started negotiations with the hackers as said on Sunday. Cloudstar is currently wanting to recover its customers’ data, many of which have resumed operations on Monday only to get that crucial land, legal or financial files had disappeared over the weekend.
While Cloudstar has customers across a good range of sectors, the company’s primary userbase is that the land and title industry, and therefore the incident has prevented many land brokers today from registering transactions and property closings.
Cloudstar faces a weeks-long data restoration process
Cloudstar President Christopher Cury, in an interview with The Title Report, which first broke the news about the ransomware incident on Saturday told the news outlet they don’t have a timeline for once they are going to be ready to restore customer files.
A Cloudstar spokesperson wasn’t available to answer additional questions following phone calls earlier today.
Nevertheless, the unfortunate news for Cloudstar is that sometimes, attacks on web and cloud hosting providers take weeks instead of days to recover, primarily thanks to the massive amount of customer data and servers that require be reimaging and restoring.
Attacks on these sorts of targets are common in recent years, as web hosting companies are usually inclined to pay ransom demands so as to make sure minimum downtime for their customers, making them very attractive to several ransomware gangs.