The American alcohol company Brown-Forman, is the latest victim of high-profile criminals using ransomware.
If the company name doesn't sound familiar to you, some of its products are well known worldwide: Brown-Forman is a multi-billion dollar whiskey company Jack Daniels, Finlandia vodka and other world 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 πρόσβαση σε επίπεδο sysadmin. Χαρτογραφούν όλα τα clients και τους servers που υπάρχουν στο δίκτυο. Μετά αναζητούν πού φυλάσσονται τα ηλεκτρονικά αντίγραφα security, detect or introduce powerful system management tools 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 as possible on the network, using an algorithm that only they have a key to. Crooks usually copy the malware across the network first, so that when they start the procedure encryption, to be performed simultaneously on all your devices, in a minimum of time.
