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.
The Clop ransomware gang is targeting Internet-exposed Gladinet CentreStack file servers in a new data theft extortion campaign. [...]
Adult video platform PornHub is being extorted by the ShinyHunters extortion gang after the search and watch history of its Premium members was reportedly stolen in a recent Mixpanel data breach. [...]
Adult video platform PornHub is being extorted by the ShinyHunters extortion gang after the search and watch history of its Premium members was reportedly stolen in a recent Mixpanel data breach. [...]
The pro-Russian hacktivist group known as CyberVolk (aka GLORIAMIST) has resurfaced with a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) offering called VolkLocker that suffers from implementation lapses in test artifacts, allowing users to decrypt files without paying an extortion fee