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.
Two members of a group of cybercriminals named ViLE were sentenced this week for hacking into a federal law enforcement web portal in an extortion scheme. [...]
Recompiled binaries and phone threats used to boost the pressure Groups linked with the Play ransomware have exploited more than 900 organizations, the FBI said Wednesday, and have developed a number of new techniques in their double-extortion campaigns - including exploiting a security flaw in remote-access tool SimpleHelp if orgs haven't patched it.…
Google has disclosed details of a financially motivated threat cluster that it said "specialises" in voice phishing (aka vishing) campaigns designed to breach organizations' Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and subsequent extortion
Victims include hospitality, retail and education sectors A group of financially motivated cyberscammers who specialize in Scattered-Spider-like fake IT support phone calls managed to trick employees at about 20 organizations into installing a modified version of Salesforce's Data Loader that allows the crims to steal sensitive data.…
Google has observed hackers claiming to be the ShinyHunters extortion group conducting social engineering attacks against multi-national companies to steal data from organizations' Salesforce platforms. [...]