Corporate travel manager CWT paid $4.5 million worth of bitcoin in ransom this week to hackers who said they seized control of 30,000 company computers and two terabytes of data, Reuters reported on Friday (July 31).
The press service said it learned of the main points of negotiations between CWT, in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and unidentified hackers, as discussions took place in a publicly available chat room.
Reuters reported that the thieves first searched for $10 million before settling for $4.5 million, and it is unclear whether personal visitor knowledge was compromised by the attack.
A CWT representative told the press service: “Although the investigation is at an early stage, we have no indication that identifiable data/customer and traveller data has been compromised.”
Reuters reported that the hackers were a software called RagnarLocker. According to PC security company McAfee, the criminals have been RagnarLocker since 2019.
“RagnarLocker is an undeniable ransomware, just like the others that exist in the criminal market. Because of its small size, the competitive habit of the operator and the wisdom it seems to have allows you to enter corporate networks as well as the risk of data leakage If the ransom is not paid, RagnarLocker could be a wonderful risk in the future,” McAfee says on its website. “Time will tell if RagnarLocker is a serious risk or not considered appropriate in a context of another ransomware with more resources. The code is of average quality.”
Hacking computers like RagnarLocker paints on components preventing valid PC users from performing functional backups. Security experts say one way to thwart such attacks is to keep backups offsite that cannot be compromised through an attack on an organization’s host system.
On Thursday, July 30, the FBI alerted organizations around the world to give the impression that a type of ransomware attack was accumulating.
The coup for CWT comes when commercial agencies have begun to see renewed business interest in businessArray
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