November 3, 2021

BlackMatter affiliates move to LockBit to continue extortion of BlackMatter ransomware victims after BlackMatter shutdown

With the threat actors behind BlackMatter Ransomware announcing they were shutting down on Monday 1st of November 2021, the remaining affiliates have been moving their victims to the competing ransomware gang. LockBit to continue the extortion of their victims. This has been proven by the fact that in existing BlackMatter negotiation chats to victims, affiliates are now providing victims links […]
November 3, 2021

UK Labour Party announce data breach after being informed of ransomware attack

On Wednesday 3rd of November 2021, the Labour Party, a political party in the United Kingdom released a statement that revealed on 29th October 2021, they were contacted by a third party about a cyber incident that had resulted in a large volume of the Party’s data being made inaccessible. “We were informed of the cyber incident by the third […]
November 3, 2021

BlackMatter ransomware gang announce the shutdown of operations due to pressure from authorities

On Monday 1st of November 2021, the threat actors behind the BlackMatter Ransomware released an announcement on their ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) website which is used by their affiliates to communicate with the core ransomware operators and receive support during operations. The announcement stated that the operation was going to shut down after 48 hours of the release of the announcement. Due […]
November 2, 2021

FBI warn ransomware gangs are targeting companies during time-sensitive financial events

On Monday 1st of November 2021, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a TLP: WHITE private industry notification where they warned that threat actors from ransomware gangs are starting to target companies that involved in significant, time-sensitive financial events like corporate mergers and acquisitions in the hope that these events will encourage these target companies to pay […]
November 1, 2021

Handa Hospital in Tokushima Prefecture disrupted heavily by ransomware attack

On Sunday 31st of October 2021, Tsurugi municipal Handa Hospital in Tokushima Prefecture suffered a ransomware attack which disrupted the operations of the hospital and involved electronic records of over 85,000 patients being made inaccessible. Indications of the incident were noticed at 12:30 a.m. when many of hospital’s printers started to print out messages that stated the hospital’s data had […]
November 1, 2021

Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador healthcare providers hit by possible ransomware attack

On Saturday 30th of October 2021, healthcare providers and hospitals from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador experienced a possible ransomware attack. The attack led to the regional health systems having to shut down their networks and thousands of medical appointments were cancelled because of the outage. It has been confirmed that the outage is a result of a […]
October 30, 2021

Chaos ransomware variant targets Minecraft players in Japan

On Thursday 28th of October 2021, cyber security researchers from FortiGuard Labs released a report revealing they had recently discovered variant of the Chaos ransomware that is being used to target Minecraft players in Japan. The FortiGuard Labs researchers have stated that this variant is unique due to the fact they not only encrypt certain files of a size smaller […]
October 27, 2021

Grief ransomware gang adds the National Rifle Association of America as a victim

On Wednesday 27th of October 2021, the Grief ransomware gang added The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) to their data leak as a victim of one of their attacks. The gang provide evidence of the attack by providing screenshots of Excel spreadsheets containing US tax information and investments amounts. They also have leaked a 2.7 MB archive titled ‘National […]
October 27, 2021

Avast releases free AtomSilo and LockFile ransomware decryptor based on weakness in AtomSilo ransomware

On Wednesday 27th of October 2021, Avast, a Czech cybersecurity software firm announced that they had released a free decryption tool for AtomSilo and LockFile ransomware victims based on a weakness in the AtomSilo ransomware that found by RE – CERT malware analyst Jiří Vinopal. The decryptor is valid for both kinds of ransomware strains as they are very similar […]