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.
Grafana has disclosed that an "unauthorized party" obtained a token that granted them the ability to access the company's GitHub environment and download its codebase
'Have I Been Pwned' Founder Troy Hunt Reviews Impact on People and OrganizationsThe volume of data breaches that result in stolen personal data being leaked online has been surging, "courtesy of the ShinyHunters," and while it affects individuals, the organizations being extorted are bearing the brunt of such attacks, said Troy Hunt, founder and CEO of Have I Been Pwned.
The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is calling on Instructure executives to testify about two cyberattacks by the ShinyHunters extortion group that targeted the company's Canvas platform, allowing threat actors to steal student data and disrupt schools during final exams. [...]
Instructure, the edtech giant behind the widely popular Canvas learning management system (LMS), has reached an "agreement" with the ShinyHunters extortion group to prevent the data stolen in a recent breach from being leaked online. [...]
American educational technology company Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said it reached an "agreement" with a decentralized cybercrime extortion group after it breached its network and threatened to leak stolen information from thousands of schools and universities
ShinyHunters, a prolific cybercrime group, threatened to leak data from more than 8,800 school systems. The post Instructure claims hackers returned stolen Canvas data after an extortion standoff appeared first on CyberScoop.
Education technology giant Instructure has confirmed that a security vulnerability allowed hackers to modify Canvas login portals and leave an extortion message. [...]
ShinyHunters has escalated its Canvas extortion campaign, defacing hundreds of school login pages and threatening to leak stolen data unless institutions negotiate