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.
In several cases, the group did not deploy ransomware and performed extortion using stolen data
A cybercrime group known as Vice Society has been linked to multiple ransomware strains in its malicious campaigns aimed at the education, government, and retail sectors
From ransomware to remote workers to cyber-extortion gangs to Fred in shipping who clicks on the wrong link, cybersecurity concerns can keep you awake this season and all seasons.
The Hive ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group has claimed responsibility for a cyber attack against Tata Power that was disclosed by the company less than two weeks ago
A CISA advisory warns that the Daixin Team ransomware group has put the US healthcare system in its crosshairs for data extortion, and provides tools to fight back.
Gang was behind the attack on OakBend Medical Center Federal agencies are warning of a threat group called Daixin Team that is using ransomware and data extortion tactics to target US healthcare organizations.…
Your IT storage may go from terabytes to Exbytes At least one affiliate of the high-profile ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group BlackByte is using a custom tool to exfiltrate files from a victim's network, a key step in the fast-growing business of double-extortion.…
U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have published a joint advisory warning of attacks perpetrated by a cybercrime gang known as the Daixin Team primarily targeting the healthcare sector in the country