Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware
Summary: Abnormal Security's Crane Hassold posed as a target and corresponded for five days with a scammer who offered him 40 percent of a million-dollar ransom to launch the DemonWare ransomware strain, freely available on GitHub, inside his employer's network. The actor said he first tried phishing senior executives, pivoted to the ransomware pretext after that failed, and was tied to a young man in Nigeria raising money for a social network called Sociogram.
Key Takeaway: The pitch is crude, but the same social engineering behind it drives business email compromise, which the FBI's IC3 reported at $1.86 billion in losses for 2020, more than any other cybercrime category. LockBit 2.0 and BlackMatter have run comparable insider solicitations, so the recruiter may be a wallpaper ad or a forum post rather than a stranger's email.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Ransomware
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