Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service's login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider, a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and an alleged co-conspirator appeared in a London court to face accusations of hacking into and extorting several large U.K. retailers, the London transit system, and healthcare providers in the United States.

Cybercrime groups that specialize in stealing corporate data and demanding a ransom not to publish it have tried countless approaches to shaming their victims into paying. The latest innovation in ratcheting up the heat comes from the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group, which has traditionally published any stolen victim data on the Dark Web. Today, however, the group began publishing individual victim websites on the public Internet, with the leaked data made available in an easily searchable form.

KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects. T-Mobile says no customer or government information was stolen in the intrusion. LAPSUS$ is known for stealing data and then demanding a ransom not to publish or sell it. But the leaked chats indicate this mercenary activity was of little interest to the tyrannical teenage leader of LAPSUS$, whose obsession with stealing and leaking proprietary computer source code from the world’s largest tech companies ultimately led to the group’s undoing.

Microsoft and identity management platform Okta both disclosed this week breaches involving LAPSUS$, a relatively new cybercrime group that specializes in stealing data from big companies and threatening to publish the information unless a ransom demand is paid. Here's a closer look at LAPSUS$, and some of the low-tech but high-impact methods the group uses to gain access to targeted organizations.