The Ransomware With 600 Victims Has a Playbook From 2015

Ransomware headlines usually smuggle in a new trick — a zero-day, a novel loader, some clever bit of tradecraft. SafePay, the group CISA and the FBI just spent a joint advisory on, has no trick at all. And that's exactly what makes it worth a few minutes of your attention.

On October 20, CISA, the FBI, the US Secret Service, Germany's Landeskriminalamt Rheinland-Pfalz, and the UK's National Crime Agency published a joint advisory on SafePay, a ransomware operation that has hit at least 600 organizations across critical infrastructure sectors in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia since August 2024. The initial access story is almost insultingly ordinary: exposed or stolen credentials, brute-force password guessing, and exploitation of VPN appliances — with the advisory specifically calling out IP addresses belonging to the VPN provider Mullvad. No exploit kit fireworks, no supply-chain worm. There is a supply-chain flavor, though: the group's 2025 attack on Ingram Micro disrupted the distributor's order processing and reminded everyone that wholesale IT distribution is itself critical infrastructure — when one distributor's systems stutter, resellers across half a continent feel it in their order queues. The agencies also repeated, for the record, what incident responders already know — paying the ransom does not guarantee you get your files back.

Here's the operational reading. Six hundred victims is not a spike — it's an accumulation. Nobody noticed 600 breaches at once; they accrued quietly over two years, which means the affected organizations mostly failed at boring things: MFA on VPN concentrators, password reuse audits, alerting on impossible-travel logins, and actually patching the perimeter gear that sits, exposed, at the edge of the network like a lawn ornament that happens to be a front door. If your VPN appliance has a public IP and a login form, this advisory is addressed to you personally. The fix list reads like it was printed in 2015 — phishing-resistant MFA, credential hygiene, network segmentation, offline backups — and the uncomfortable part is that it still moves the needle more than anything exotic would. The unglamorous controls are the ones keeping the victim count climbing or falling; the exotic ones just make conference talks.

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What I keep turning over is the ordering question. If you only have this quarter's budget for one hardening project, do you fix the exposed entry point — VPN MFA, patching cycles, killing legacy login surfaces — or the middle of the chain: detection, EDR coverage, response runbooks? Every ransomware postmortem says both matter, but budgets force a sequence, and SafePay's numbers suggest attackers are still walking in through the front gate at industrial scale. The group didn't outsmart anyone; it just kept showing up while nobody locked the door. If you're the admin holding the budget, which one did you actually fix first — and did it hold?

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