Ragnar Locker Ransomware gang has officially declared that they are responsible for the disruption of servers related to a Greece-based gas operator DESFA. And reports are in that Ragnar Locker Gang is demanding $12 million to free up data from encryption.
DESFA released a press statement that it became a victim of a ransomware attack on Saturday last week and assured that its business continuity plan will surely bail them out of the present situation, without paying a penny.
Natural Gas supply hasn’t been hit by the malware, however, some systems on the administration side were reportedly disrupted.
FBI issued a statement in May this year that Ragnar Locker was responsible for the disruption of systems across 53 organizations in the past two years, including 35 from the critical sector of the United States.
Interestingly, the law enforcement agency has determined that Ragnar Locker ransomware spreading group avoids putting forward its ransom demand to victims from Azerbaijan, Armenian, Belorussian, Russian, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Moldavian, Turkmen, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Georgia and instead terminates its infection from that system or network, and the reason for this is yet to be probed.
NOTE- Donuts Leaks, a new data extortion group is also linked to Ragnar Locker and is responsible to target Sheppard Robson, the UK-based Architectural company, and Construction giant Sando and the same group was responsible to announce to the world the digital attack on DESFA.
It is worth noting that the cyber attack comes at the point when gas suppliers in Europe are facing fuel supply shortages because of the cut-off of trade ties with Russia over fuel supply. As the former is supporting Ukraine in the war with Putin and so come winter, the public is expected to be plagued by troubles such as power cuts, fuel prices soaring, rationing, and of course load-shedding blackouts.
Meantime, Technology Giant Microsoft issued a statement yesterday that 80% of ransomware attacks are expected to occur because of system configuration errors, and the same was rendered in its latest Cyber Signals report.
The Satya Nadella-led company has also reiterated that the proliferation of ransomware as a service could bring complications for companies that aren’t focusing much on cybersecurity.
Highlighting the achievements made by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes unit, which have been combating cybercrime since 2008, the Windows OS offering firm stated that its security teams have removed over 531,000 unique phishing URLs and about 5400 phishing kits between July 2021 to June 2022.
