The American alcohol company Brown-Forman, is the latest victim of high-profile criminals using ransomware.
If the name of the company does not seem familiar to you some of the productits brands are well known worldwide: Brown-Forman is a multi-billion dollar business that owns Jack Daniels whiskey, Finlandia vodka and other global brands.
It is a multi-billion dollar business based in Louisville, Kentucky - a US state famous for its American bourbon whiskey. Of course the many millions attract scammers.
According with Bloomberg claiming to have been informed by the same swindlers who carried out the attack, the gang is called REvil or Sodinokibi.
REVil's members belong to the "new wave" of ransomware administrators who perform attacks three stages and end in extortion:
1. Εισέρχονται στο δίκτυο ενός θύματος για μια αναγνώριση. Κατά τη διάρκεια αυτής της αναγνώρισης, οι απατεώνες έχουν access σε επίπεδο sysadmin. Χαρτογραφούν όλα τα clients και τους servers που υπάρχουν στο δίκτυο. Μετά αναζητούν πού φυλάσσονται τα ηλεκτρονικά αντίγραφα ασφαλείας, εντοπίζουν ή εισάγουν ισχυρά tools system administration that they can later use to aid in the attack. Sometimes, they even launch mini-attacks with test samples of malware as a way of probing the victim's defenses and to see which attack techniques are more likely to succeed.
2. Theft. They get as much corporate data as they can get their hands on. In the Brown-Forman attack, the attackers claim to have 1 terabyte of data and Bloomberg reports that it has received evidence of data breach, citing sample files that go back more than 10 years.
3. They then encrypt as many files on the network as possible, using an algorithm from which only they have a key. Scammers usually copy the malware across the network first, so that when they start the encryption process, it runs on all of your devices in a short time.
