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.
Pharmaceutical giant Novartis says no sensitive data was compromised in a recent cyberattack by the Industrial Spy data-extortion gang. [...]
Is the gang some sort of Conti side hustle? The answer may be yes The Feds have warned organizations about a lesser-known extortion gang Karakurt, which demands ransoms as high as $13 million and, some cybersecurity folks say, may be linked to the notorious Conti crew.…
A pair of phishing campaigns against users of WhatsApp and Telegram's Telegraph expose them to extortion, credential harvesting, and even account takeover.
A ransomware gang is taking extortion to a new level by publicly hacking corporate websites to publicly display ransom notes. [...]
Melissa Bischoping, security researcher with Tanium and Infosec Insiders columnist, urges firms to consider the upstream and downstream impact of "triple extortion" ransomware attacks.
As ransomware infections have evolved from purely encrypting data to schemes such as double and triple extortion, a new attack vector is likely to set the stage for future campaigns
Several U.S. federal agencies warned organizations today against paying ransom demands made by the Karakurt gang since that will not prevent their stolen data from being sold to others. [...]
Costa Rica’s national health service was hacked sometime earlier this morning by a Russian ransomware group known as Hive. The intrusion comes just weeks after Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency in response to a data ransom attack from a different Russian ransomware gang — Conti. Ransomware experts say there is good reason to believe the same cybercriminals are behind both attacks, and that Hive has been helping Conti rebrand and evade international sanctions targeting extortion payouts to cybercriminals operating in Russia.