Hacker stole £700,000 from UK energy company by redirecting payment


British oil and gas company Zephyr Energy says someone stole £700,000 (close to $1 million) from one of its U.S.-based subsidiaries by redirecting a payment meant for a contractor into a hacker-controlled account. In a regulatory filing with the London Stock Exchange on Thursday, the company said it is “working with the corresponding banks and consultants to attempt to recover the diverted funds.”

While the company did not say how the incident occurred, hackers are known to break into email inboxes or accounting systems and use that access to alter bank account and routing numbers during the process of paying someone or clearing an invoice. Known as business email compromise attacks, the FBI said in its most recent annual report published on internet cybercrime earlier in April that these attacks remain one of the top sources of financial losses, totaling more than $3 billion in victim losses during 2025.

Read more…
Source: TechCrunch News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • No Manners Here: The Ruthless Rise of The Gentlemen Ransomware

    July 10, 2026

    The Gentlemen (aka Storm-2697) is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) program active since at least July 2025. Public reporting indicates that the operators were likely active months earlier as an affiliate (known as ArmCorp) of Qilin RaaS, which Unit 42 tracks as Spikey Scorpius. Their ransomware variants are written in both C and Go programming languages, enabling ...

  • Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies

    July 10, 2026

    Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Thursday, noting that the government seized more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency and assets. Martino ...

  • Accenture confirms breach after hacker steals 35GB of source code and other data

    July 9, 2026

    Accenture has confirmed suffering a cyberattack, days after threat actors started selling an archive allegedly coming from the firm. “We are aware of this isolated matter, and we have remediated its source. There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery,” Accenture said in a statement. It follows a relatively unknown threat actor called 888 posting ...

  • An unnamed US county paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

    July 9, 2026

    A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted – just the criminals’ promise. This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a ...

  • GigaWiper: Anatomy of a destructive backdoor assembled from multiple malware

    July 9, 2026

    In October 2025, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified destructive wiping activity and uncovered a sophisticated Go programming language (Golang)-based backdoor we now track as GigaWiper, a versatile implant that combines robust command-and-control (C2) capabilities with multiple destructive payloads, including disk wiping, fake ransomware, and system-level sabotage. GigaWiper is particularly notable for its makeup. It’s not a single, ...

  • 6.9 million driver’s license numbers stolen from AssuranceAmerica

    July 9, 2026

    Insurance provider AssuranceAmerica has confirmed a data breach affecting the personal information and driver’s license numbers of up to 6.9 million people. AssuranceAmerica provides car and rental insurance to customers across 14 US states through a network of over 9,500 independent agents. The breach notice letter also mentions information about customers’ auto insurance policies and accounts, their drivers and ...