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
Related:
- Fast Flux 101: How Cybercriminals Improve the Resilience of Their Infrastructure to Evade Detection and Law Enforcement Takedowns
March 2, 2021
Fast flux is a technique used by cybercriminals to increase their infrastructure’s resilience by making law enforcement takedown of their servers and blocklisting of their IP addresses harder. It is critical for these cybercriminals to maintain their networks’ uptime to avoid losses to their revenue streams, including phishing and scam campaigns, botnet rental and illegal ...
- Emotet One Month After the Takedown
March 2, 2021
2021 got off to a fantastic start for the cybersecurity community with the news that the infamous botnet Emotet had been brought down in a coordinated global operation, “Operation Ladybird.” As the first security vendor to detect and profile the Trojan all the way back in 2014, we’re particularly delighted to be seeing the back of ...
- Working Windows and Linux Spectre exploits found on VirusTotal
March 1, 2021
Working exploits targeting Linux and Windows systems not patched against a three-year-old vulnerability dubbed Spectre were found by security researcher Julien Voisin on VirusTotal. The vulnerability was unveiled as a hardware bug in January 2018 by Google Project Zero researchers. If successfully exploited on vulnerable systems, it can be used by attackers to steal sensitive data, including ...
- New South Wales’ Transport agency extorted by ransomware gang after Accellion attack
March 1, 2021
The transport system for the Australian state of New South Wales has suffered a data breach after the Clop ransomware exploited a vulnerability to steal files. Transport for NSW is New South Wales’ transport system in charge of the buses, ferries, regional air operators, and cargo transportation. Last week, Transport for NSW disclosed that their agency suffered ...
- Mobile malware evolution 2020
March 1, 2021
In their campaigns to infect mobile devices, cybercriminals always resort to social engineering tools, the most common of these passing a malicious application off as another, popular and desirable one. All they need to do is correctly identify the application, or at least, the type of applications, that are currently in demand. Therefore, attackers constantly ...
- Povlsomware PoC Ransomware Features Cobalt Strike Compatibility
March 1, 2021
Povlsomware (Ransom.MSIL.POVLSOM.THBAOBA) is a proof-of-concept (POC) ransomware first released in November 2020 which, according to their Github page, is used to “securely” test the ransomware protection capabilities of security vendor products. Povlsomware has not garnered much attention at the moment, being talked about in only a few sites — however, it has some interesting characteristics, ...