- Ransomware group reports theft of large AkzoNobel data file
- The leaked files include confidential personal and corporate documents.
- The company confirms the incident but emphasizes the 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.
AkzoNobel, headquartered in the Netherlands, is a multinational company that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of paints and coatings, whose products are used in homes, buildings, automobiles, industrial equipment and elsewhere.
The attack was claimed by a ransomware operator called Anubis, who says he took nearly 170,000 files and leaked samples on his dark web page, including screenshots of selected documents and a tree of files.
Limited impact
The published data reportedly contains confidential agreements with high-profile clients, email addresses and phone numbers, email conversations, passport scans, materials testing documents and internal technical specification sheets.
After the leak, the company confirmed the news and gave more context about the violation:
“AkzoNobel has identified a security incident at one of our sites in the United States. The incident was limited to the respective site and was already contained,” the company said. beepcomputer. “The impact is limited and we are taking appropriate steps to notify and support affected parties and will work closely with relevant authorities.”
Anubis was also said to have leaked only a portion of the stolen files, which could mean it reached some sort of deal with AkzoNobel. The company did not say whether it spoke to the attackers or not.
Anubis is a relatively new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, which rose to prominence last summer when it added a new feature to its encryptor that irreversibly destroys all encrypted files on the compromised system.
When threat actors activate the feature, the cleaner deletes 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 them.
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