During trend Micro researchers monitoring of the ransomware threat landscape, they discovered samples with infection chain characteristics and payloads that can be attributed to FOG ransomware.
A total of nine samples were uploaded to VirusTotal between March 27 and April 2, which the researchers recently discovered were multiple ransomware binaries with .flocked extension and readme.txt notes. Trend Micro observed that these samples initially dropped a note containing key names related to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative of the current US administration that has been making headlines, recently about a member who allegedly assisted a cybercrime group involved in data theft and cyberstalking an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The note also contains instructions to spread the ransomware payload to other computers by pasting the provided code in the note.
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Source: Trend Micro
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