Several federal agencies were compromised in a Russian cyber-extortion gang’s global hack of a file-transfer program popular with corporations and governments, Homeland Security officials said.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.Jen Easterly, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, speaks at the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting, Feb. 16, 2023, in Washington.
“Based on discussions we have had with industry partners ... these intrusions are not being leveraged to gain broader access, to gain persistence into targeted systems, or to steal specific high value information— in sum, as we understand it, this attack is largely an opportunistic one,” Easterly said.
Louisiana officials said Thursday that people with a driver’s license or vehicle registration in the state likely had their personal information exposed. That included their name, address, Social Security number and birthdate. They encouraged Louisiana residents to freeze their credit to guard against identity theft.
The gang, among the world’s most prolific cybercrime syndicates, also claimed it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments. “At this point, we are seeing industry estimates of several hundred of victims across the country,” the senior CISA official said. Federal officials encouraged victims to come forward, but they often don’t. The U.S. lacks a federal data breach law, and disclosure of hacks varies by state. Publicly traded corporations, health care providers and some critical infrastructure purveyors do have regulatory obligations.
The hackers were actively scanning for targets, penetrating them and stealing data at least as far back as March 29, said SecurityScorecard threat analyst Jared Smith.This is far from the first time Cl0p has breached a file-transfer program to gain access to data it could then use to extort companies. Other instances include GoAnywhere servers in early 2023 and Accellion File Transfer Application devices in 2020 and 2021.
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