Asahi Group Holdings hacked by the BlackByte ransomware

The BlackByte ransomware group has claimed that they hacked the Asahi Group Holdings, resulting in stolen data from the company. The affected entity is a precision meta-manufacturing and metal solution firm that has been operating for about 40 years.

Asahi Group Holding has been providing end-to-end services in thin-film coatings and precision metals with a different group of specialists. The BlackByte ransomware group has allegedly stolen troves of data from them, which amounts to several gigabytes of documents that contain sales and financial reports of the company.

Currently, the ransomware actors demand a whopping $500 thousand to purchase back the data and $600 thousand to delete the exfiltrated data.

 

The BlackByte ransomware group has been on a rampage for several months, infecting companies left and right.

 

According to researchers, the BlackByte ransomware group has been operating since September last year. The following month since its emergence, a group of researchers published a decryptor that could enable victims to restore their files without paying the BlackByte ransom demands.

Unfortunately, the free decryptor only works on the old versions of BlackByte ransomware. Hence, the newer versions of the malicious entity are potent to the free decryptor from the researchers.

The decryptor was spotted in one of BlackByte’s flawed operations, but the BlackByte operators immediately fixed the issue after researchers published it last year.

Earlier this year, a US federal law enforcement agency revealed that the BlackByte group had infiltrated more than a couple of organisations from the US critical infrastructure departments.

A few months ago, a new version of the BlackByte ransomware emerged in the cybercriminal environment. The latest version, the BlackByte version 2.0, employed extortion tactics identical to the LockBit operator’s strategy.

The new extortion method enables its victims to provide a $5,000 payment to postpone the exposure of their data by 24 hours. The extortion tactic also offers the victim to pay $200,000 for retrieving the data or $300,000 to destroy all the stolen data. The prices for BlackByte’s extortion tactic vary and depend on its victim’s importance.

Last month, researchers warned organisations that the BlackByte group can now use a BYOVD attack method to avoid security solutions.