Stay updated on cyber extortion trends: threats, prevention tips, and incident responses. Protect your data with the latest info on digital ransom tactics.
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Background for this topic.
Extortion is coercion through threats: an attacker demands money or another concession while threatening harm if the victim refuses. In cybersecurity, this commonly involves encrypting systems and demanding payment for recovery, stealing data and threatening to publish it (often called double extortion), or threatening service disruption. The threatened harm may be real, exaggerated, or based on data the attacker did not actually obtain; payment does not guarantee data deletion, secrecy, or restoration.
Security teams should treat an extortion demand as a potential incident: preserve evidence, isolate affected systems, determine whether data was accessed, and involve legal and privacy specialists where notification or regulatory duties may apply. Offline, tested backups can reduce leverage from encryption, but they do not address stolen information. Reviewing exposed remote services, credentials, and unpatched internet-facing systems can help contain the access path, while threat intelligence may help assess the attacker’s claims and identify related activity.
The ShinyHunters extortion group has leaked data from 13.5 million McGraw Hill user accounts, stolen after breaching the company's Salesforce environment earlier this month. [...]
Education company McGraw-Hill has confirmed in a statement to BleepingComputer that hackers exploited a Salesforce misconfiguration and accessed its internal data. [...]
Rockstar Games has suffered a data breach linked to a recent security incident at Anodot, with the ShinyHunters extortion gang now leaking the stolen data on its data leak site. [...]