The staggering sum of US $75 million has reportedly been paid to a ransomware gang in what’s believed to be the biggest recognized ransom fee made by a cyber assault sufferer since information started.
Researchers at Zscaler declare in a brand new report that the record-breaking determine was paid by an undisclosed Fortune 50 firm to the Darkish Angels ransomware group.
The reported fee nearly doubles the earlier report – $40 million paid by insurance coverage big CNA Monetary in 2021 after being locked out of its community by attackers utilizing the Phoenix Locker ransomware.
Darkish Angels, which emerged in Might 2022, has focused a variety of industries together with healthcare, finance, authorities, and schooling. Most just lately it has been seen launching assaults towards massive industrial, technological and telecoms corporations.
By means of its Dunghill knowledge leak website on the darkish net, Darkish Angels claims to be “a world workforce of technical specialists conducting analysis within the subject of knowledge safety” that’s “not interested by politics, and that’s the reason we don’t cooperate with governments and regulation enforcement businesses.”
The reality is, after all, that Darkish Angels’ manner of making a living is thru extortion – threatening corporations that their knowledge shall be leaked to the world if a ransom will not be paid.
Darkish Angels, having compromised an organization’s safety, resolve whether or not to encrypt a enterprise’s recordsdata after which, as a rule, spend days and even weeks exfiltrating huge quantities of knowledge.
Within the circumstances of bigger companies which have been infiltrated by the group, as much as 100 TB of knowledge could also be stolen in accordance with Zscaler’s researchers.
In a high-profile incident reported by Bleeping Pc in September 2023, Darkish Angels hit a multinational conglomerate, forcing it to close down its IT programs, having encrypted the agency’s VMware ESXi digital machines and claimed to have stolen over 27 TB of company knowledge.
Darkish Angels reportedly demanded a US $51 million ransom from Johnson Controls in alternate for a decryption instrument and to delete the recordsdata it had stolen. The corporate later reported in an SEC submitting that the expense of investigating and remediating the assault, in addition to losses attributable to enterprise disruption, had price it over US $27 million.
Confronted with the headline of an organization paying a record-breaking US $75 million ransom fee, many companies could be questioning how they’d reply when offered with a requirement from cybercriminals.
Admittedly, it is most likely a terrific deal simpler for a enterprise to resolve whether or not it ought to cough up tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to a ransomware gang than ten thousand {dollars} – however the questions it’s good to ask your self stay the identical.
Everyone knows that the extra companies conform to pay a ransom, the extra seemingly it’s that cybercriminals will launch comparable assaults towards others sooner or later – in addition to, maybe, your organization once more.
On the similar time, your organization could really feel it has no selection however to make the arduous determination to pay. In spite of everything, the choice could put the complete enterprise in danger – and put the livelihoods of your workers, companions, and maybe even purchasers in danger.
No matter your determination, I’d say that it’s important to tell regulation enforcement businesses of the incident and work with them to assist them examine who is perhaps behind the assaults.
Most significantly, do not forget that paying a ransom doesn’t make sure that the safety drawback that allowed the attackers into your community within the first place now not exists. For those who don’t discover out what went improper – and why – and repair it, then you would simply fall sufferer to additional ransomware assaults sooner or later.
Editor’s Word: The opinions expressed on this and different visitor writer articles are solely these of the contributor and don’t essentially mirror these of Tripwire.
