- Ransomware group claims to steal big data archive from AkzoNobel
- Leaked files include sensitive personal and corporate documents
- The company confirms the incident but highlights a limited impact
Cybercriminals claimed to have recently broken into AkzoNobel and stolen 170GB of data, including user emails, phone numbers, passport scans and other sensitive data.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, AkzoNobel is a multinational company that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of paints and coatings, whose products are used in homes, buildings, cars, industrial equipment and elsewhere.
The attack was claimed by a ransomware operator called Anubis, which claims to have scraped nearly 170,000 files and leaked samples on its dark web page, which included screenshots of some documents and a file tree.
Limited impact
The published data is said to contain confidential agreements with high-profile clients, email addresses and telephone numbers, email conversations, passport scans, material testing documents and internal data sheets.
Following the leak, the company confirmed the news and gave more context on the breach:
“AkzoNobel has identified a security incident at one of our sites in the United States. The incident was limited to the affected site and was already contained,” the company said. BeepComputer. “The impact is limited and we are taking appropriate steps to inform and support affected parties and will work closely with the relevant authorities.”
It was also said that Anubis only disclosed part of the stolen archives, which could mean that he had reached some sort of agreement with AkzoNobel. The company did not say whether or not it had spoken to the attackers.
Anubis is a relatively new Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation, which came to light last summer when it added a new feature to its encryptor that irreversibly destroys all encrypted files on the compromised system.
When malicious actors activate the feature, the wiper erases the contents of the files and reduces their size to 0 KB. The file names and structure remain intact, meaning it is impossible to recover the files.
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