StateScoop reports that threat actors associated with the Babuk malware claimed they have stolen more than 250 gigabytes of data from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., which appeared on a ransomware leak site on Monday.
The stolen data include arrest records, police reports, internal memos and documents which have been shared with other authorities, such as the FBI.
According to intelligence company Recorded Future’s Allan Liska, the attack was unlikely to be an intentional attack on the nation’s capital. The incident was possibly a crime of opportunity since the malware does not have a history of targeting organizations in the public sector like school districts and local governments, and uses phishing schemes and looks for vulnerabilities, such as open Remote Desktop Protocol ports, Liska added.
“They’re scanning for open RDP or something like that, and bam, they hit the police department,” said Liska.
Liska noted that Babuk has “improved a lot” and is “a lot more difficult to detect because it can look like the admin moving around the network.
Jill Aitoro leads editorial for SC Media, and content strategy for parent company CyberRisk Alliance. She 20 years of experience editing and reporting on technology, business and policy.
Information compromised in the incident, including names and other personal data, has not been misused by attackers, said ARRL in a filing with the Office of Maine's Attorney General.
Attackers have only obtained access to an archive of The Daily Signal website dating back to 2022 but not access to any of the think tank's systems, according to Heritage spokesperson Noah Weinrich.
Infiltration of systems enabled attackers to exfiltrate individuals' names, birthdates, Social Security numbers, and other government-issued ID numbers stored between April 14 and May 24.
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