Marco A. De Felice reports:
The Avaddon ransomware group publishes screenshots of some data stolen during the cyber attack on the Unione di Comuni Colli del Monferrato, but by mistake it puts the wrong Unione (Unione dei Colli DiVini in the heart of Monferrato) under DDoS attack.
Oops? But as Marco notes, that wasn’t the end of their mistakes:
It is not the only mistake of cybercriminals, among the data exfiltrated and published yesterday there is a document from Cisliano, a municipality in the Milanese hinterland and which obviously has nothing to do with the Unions of Municipalities of the province of Asti.
Read more on SuspectFile.
This does not look good for Avaddon, and is the type of sloppy mistakes that we used to see with Maze operators at times. If you name the wrong victim are you also attempting to extort the wrong victim or sending emails to the wrong victim?
The errors SuspectFile describes are not the only errors spotted on Avaddon’s site this week. In the course of investigating another one of Avaddon’s listings, DataBreaches.net discovered that they had named the wrong victim in that matter, too. DataBreaches.net has reached out to the real victim to inquire as to whether they ever knew they had been breached and what they are doing about it. That matter will be reported under a separate post in the near future.
Updated 6:42 pm: If there is a Keystone Kops version of ransomware attacks, Avaddon’s attack on these Italian entities would be it. Marco emailed Avaddon yesterday to suggest they brush up on the Italian geography. Today, he published his post pointing out their errors. Within hours of the latter, Avaddon revised its listing for the incident. In an update to SuspectFile, Marco observes:
Avaddon changed the post header from “UNION OF THE DIVINE HILLS IN THE HEART OF MONFERRATO” to “MUNICIPALITY OF VILLAFRANCA D’ASTI”, as documented in the image below, also leaving the wrong site still under DDoS attack (unionecolledivini.at.it) which brings together a series of municipalities of the Asti area, but not those of Villafranca d’Asti and Baldichieri d’Asti which instead are part of the Union of Municipalities of the Monferrato Hills (collidelmonferrato.at.it) as can be seen from the documents stolen and published on the Avaddon website.
My head is spinning. Who did Avaddon actually attack, and who did they send extortion demands to? And why on earth do they keep DDoSing the wrong entity?
Really, if they have any class at all, they shoud decrypt whatever they encrypted, apologize to the entity they DDoSed and purge any files they have. As Marco pointed out, these agencies are involved in COVID-19 scheduling and public health issues. This is no time to be interfering with their functioning.