Snatch Team has recently been exploring some novel uses of Telegram. Unlike other groups that use Telegram mainly to list new leaks, Snatch is providing commentaries and analyses of their breaches and more educational materials for readers.
Some of their commentaries on specific incidents can be fodder for any lawsuits against the companies or entities they breached because they point out security failures that plaintiffs’ lawyers will appreciate. And some of CyberSnatch’s comments seem designed to help insurers avoid having to reimburse clients, which is a somewhat novel approach.
Consider their Telegram messages about IXPERTA, a Czech IT and software firm. IXPERTA was added in May to Snatch’s leak site, and then dumped this week — 300 GB of files plus Active Directory. On their Telegram channel, Snatch provides a very detailed description of how they gained access to IXPERTA and what they did once they gained access.
Their description of IXPERTA’s flaws and security is gold for researchers, analysts, and those who might want to attack IXPERTA again. But then Snatch Team goes one step further — and explains why any cyberinsurance policy IXPERTA may have should not cover any claims:
My good fellas, let me explain purpose of the previous post.
First of all, each of you can analyze the network settings and mistakes of the Ixperta company IT specialists and draw conclusions on how not to repeat them.
And after that, we hope that if Ixperta has insurance its agent will check our blog and make sure that the hack attack on the company and breaches are not an insured event payed up to 10-20-30 million euros, but the simple carelessness of the company’s employees and the greed of the company’s management, which spared money for adequate equipment and high professional specialists.
Can an insurer find that a policy will not cover an incident because of what CyberSnatch reveals about an attack and what shape the entity’s internal network was in at the time of the attack? Possibly. Snatch Team says that from now on, they will be providing detailed reports on all of the entities leaked on their main blog and offer to help insurers who are looking for ways to deny claims:
Today we start publish such information on almost all companies mentioned in our blog. The era of making money on insurance is OVER. Insurance agents, in case their clients are published in our blog, can contact us and get a full network dump with evidence that this case is not insured!
So now we have a new threat being tested or implemented, it seems: Pay us, or we’ll show your insurer why they shouldn’t cover any of your losses. DataBreaches wonders if they will let us know if more entities start paying them now rather than risk having their internal network leaked publicly and their insurer shown why they shouldn’t cover an incident. In any event, their Telegram channel makes for fascinating reading these days.