New Trend of Hacking and Old-Style Extortion

[vibranium]

If you thought ransomware was scary, imagine this: men in well-dressed suits show up at your office brandishing a binder full of stolen information they hacked out of your company and "encourage" you to hire them as your security help.

 

"'We are aware you have security problems,'" they say, explained Kaspersky Lab senior security researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, describing the newly discovered cybercrime gang out of Brazil that he and his team have dubbed the Poseidon Group. "And if you deny the Poseidon Group, all of that [stolen] information goes to the other side of [their] business we can call "market forecasting," which is basically a market intelligence service they sell with your business secrets.

 

The group flies just under the radar of pure blackmail and makes you an offer you can't refuse. And if you decline their help, they just come back again later. Poseidon leaves malware in your network so they can exfiltrate more internal information, and come calling again with more evidence of how they 0wn you. "They wait a year to approach [you] again. 'Look what I found for you: are you ready to work with me,'" they say, said Dmitry Bestuzhev, director of the global research threat analysis team at Kaspersky Lab.

 

Poseidon is a commercial cyber espionage attack group that specifically targets Portuguese and English Windows machines, and has been in action since at least 2005. The attackers so far have hit at least 35 organizations mainly in Brazil but also in the US, France, Kazakhstan, United Arab Emirates, India, and Russia, spanning financial, government, telecommunications, energy, manufacturing, service utilities, media, and public relations industry.

 

The group is tuned into the latest security research, too. "They go to conferences. We knew that they were at Black Hat," Bestuzhev said. They then are able to keep their malware and operation under the radar, he said.

 

 

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