Threat Assessment: Ignoble Scorpius, Distributors of BlackSuit Ransomware


Unit 42 researchers have observed an increase in BlackSuit ransomware activity beginning in March 2024 that suggests a ramp up of operations. This threat emerged as a rebrand of Royal ransomware, which occurred in May 2023. Unit 42 tracks the group behind this threat as Ignoble Scorpius.

Since the rebrand, Unit 42 has observed at least 93 victims globally, a quarter of which were in the construction and manufacturing industries. The group describes themselves as an “extortioner named BlackSuit” and claims to reverse file encryption for “quite a small compensation essentially.” Although the group states the compensation is small, Unit 42 has observed that, on average, the initial ransom demand is about equal to 1.6% of the victim organization’s annual revenue.

Read more…
Source: Trend Micro


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • CISA Adds 34 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    May 25, 2022

    CISA has added 34 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of ...

  • What’s wrong with automotive mobile apps?

    May 25, 2022

    The recent story about the 19-year-old hacker who took control of several dozen Tesla cars has become something of a sensation. We already know that there was an issue with a third-party app that enabled access to data from Teslas. This made it possible for the security researcher to lock and unlock the cars, turn the ...

  • New Linux-Based Ransomware Cheerscrypt Targets ESXi Devices

    May 25, 2022

    Tremd Micro researchers recently observed multiple Linux-based ransomware detections that malicious actors launched to target VMware ESXi servers, a bare-metal hypervisor for creating and running several virtual machines (VMs) that share the same hard drive storage. Trend Micro encountered Cheerscrypt, a new ransomware family, that has been targeting a customer’s ESXi server used to manage ...

  • Fake Windows exploits target infosec community with Cobalt Strike

    May 24, 2022

    A threat actor targeted security researchers with fake Windows proof-of-concept exploits that infected devices with the Cobalt Strike backdoor. Whoever is behind these attacks took advantage of recently patched Windows remote code execution vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2022-24500 and CVE-2022-26809. When Microsoft patches a vulnerability, it is common for security researchers to analyze the fix and release proof-of-concept ...

  • Anatomy of a DDoS amplification attack

    May 23, 2022

    Amplification attacks are one of the most common distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack vectors. These attacks are typically categorized as flooding or volumetric attacks, where the attacker succeeds in generating more traffic than the target can process, resulting in exhausting its resources due to the amount of traffic it receives. In this blog, we start ...

  • PDF smuggles Microsoft Word doc to drop Snake Keylogger malware

    May 22, 2022

    Threat analysts have discovered a recent malware distribution campaign using PDF attachments to smuggle malicious Word documents that infect users with malware. The choice of PDFs is unusual, as most malicious emails today arrive with DOCX or XLS attachments laced with malware-loading macro code. However, as people become more educated about opening malicious Microsoft Office attachments, threat ...