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.
Since at least February, a threat actor has been attempting to extort victims by stealing or wiping data in their GitHub repositories.
Frontier Communications is warning 750,000 customers that their information was exposed in a data breach after an April cyberattack claimed by the RansomHub ransomware operation. [...]
Frontier Communications is warning 750,000 customers that their information was exposed in a data breach after an April cyberattack claimed by the RansomHub ransomware operation. [...]
Attackers are targeting GitHub repositories, wiping their contents, and asking the victims to reach out on Telegram for more information. [...]
Security researchers analyzing the relatively new RansomHub ransomware-as-a-service believe that it has evoloved from the currently defunct Knight ransomware project. [...]
An analysis of a nascent ransomware strain called RansomHub has revealed it to be an updated and rebranded version of Knight ransomware, itself an evolution of another ransomware known as Cyclops