Fashion giant, Moncler releases statement confirming data breach after Christmas Eve ransomware attack

On Tuesday 18^th of January 2022, Moncler, an Italian luxury fashion giant announced that they received a ransom demand related to a cyber-attack they had experienced on Friday 24^th of December 2021. Originally, the incident was labelled as a malware assistance attack which resulted in a temporary outage of Moncler’s IT services to stop the spread of the attack. Therefore, the outage also impacted the operations of their logistics centres and client service activities.

“We deeply regret any inconvenience caused to our customers by the delays in the shipment of orders and apologise for the communication problems due to the systems outage.” – Moncler.

The investigation was started as well in response in the incident and it was confirmed that there was evidence of unauthorised access to personal data found and that the Italian Data Protection Authority and the police have notified. Although on Tuesday 18^th of January 2022, the ransomware group, BlackCat released a blog post on their data leak site that detailed a ransom demand of $3 million for them not to publish the stolen data that has been seen to include data on earning statements, spreadsheets with what appears to be customer information, invoices, and other documents.

Even though Moncler has stated that they have rejected the idea of paying the ransom demand as it is against their founding principles and have warned that any further possession or distribution of the stolen data would be considered a criminal offense, it is believed that now BlackCat is attempting to sell the data of rich customers to other threat actors.