Augusta in the American state of Georgia became another victim of hacker attacks that overwhelmed the United States over the past month. This time, the Blackbyte group is responsible for the attack, which require 50 million dollars for restoring urban data.
According to the mayor of the city of Garnett Johnson, published on the site Ogusts on May 24, “Technical difficulties” began Last Sunday, May 21, and influenced some computer systems of the city. The mayor admitted that Ogust was subjected to “unauthorized access to internal systems”, and promised to investigate the incident and restore the full functionality of all systems as soon as possible. At first, local authorities were not sure that any confidential data was stolen and promised to report the information as it was received.
However, yesterday Fox54 said that the incident was an extortion attack, and cyberbandites demand to pay $ 50 million cash ransom.
Representatives of the Ogasta administration at the same site , published the following statement: “Recent media reports that That the ugasta, Georgia, was taken hostage for $ 50 million as a result of the attack of the Mr. program, are incorrect. ” What does this mean is probably unknown. Hackers did not abduct the data? Or do not require 50 million ransom? We will monitor the development of the situation.
In the meantime, Blackbyte, a group of hackers, providing computers to infect components by RaAS, which has compromised many critical organizations of the United States, set the city on its website leakage and stated that it stole 10 GB of “confidential data”, according to the screenshop , published threats to Emsisoft Brett Callow on Twitter.
Blackbyte, active in 2021, follows the same tactics as many other extortion gangs: they steal data before deploying malicious software for encryption of files. This tactic is called “double extortion”.
screenshot from the Blackbyte leakage site
It is worth making a reservation that not all statements of cybercriminals should take a word. Just the other day we wrote about how hackers
The group purposefully attacks a wide range of organizations and personalities, including government agencies, critical infrastructure suppliers and private companies in the field of finance, healthcare and telecommunications. The group is especially interested in stolen confidential information, such as credit and banking data, trade secrets and political information. In this regard, there is an opinion that they are a state group that uses information to achieve its political goals. However, officially no one recognized responsibility for the actions of this group.