FBI Warns Against Ransomware Targeting Corporations
With Halloween night barely out of the door, the FBI came up with a fittingly spooky warning on November 1. The Bureau is warning against a new tactic that ransomware threat actors are starting to use, targeting corporations and publicly traded entities.
According to the FBI, ransomware gangs are now exploring new avenues of attack and additional ways to extort ransom payments from their victims. The Bureau quoted an earlier post on a Russian-language hacker forum that urged other bad actors to use US stock exchange dynamics in their efforts to extort money.
The general idea behind using public stock exchanges as additional leverage in extorting ransom is that stock prices can be very volatile near significant events for a company, including mergers, acquisitions, or quarterly reports. Hackers are hoping to mine as much sensitive and non-public data as possible from those companies, including ongoing private negotiations, and then threaten to leak this information publicly.
Similar leaks may have a dramatic effect on stock prices, especially when they are made near the point in time where a big event is coming for the respective company. In short, this is just another vice that ransomware gangs can use to squeeze their victims in, given they refuse to pay the ransom.
The FBI warning even quotes a specific DarkSide group post that specifically mentioned hacked publicly traded entities. DarkSide threatened to leak sensitive information ahead of the anticipated dates of regular disclosure to interested parties, threatening to cause price fluctuation and destabilize the share price of the affected entities.
Bad actors are also looking for other new venues for illegal profit. Only yesterday the world of cryptocurrency trading was once again shaken up by the spectacular collapse of the Squid Game token, not to be confused with the Netflix series of the same name. Investors who lost their life's savings and are now effectively broke, with Squid Game tokens dropping from thousands of dollars to sub-penny, are now calling the event a "rug-pull" and a scam.
