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On September 2nd, the U.S. branch of Great Star Industrial Co. disbursed a ransom of 1 million dollars to a ransomware group

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Dissent

Over at SuspectFile, Marco A. De Felice writes:

We are in the early days of last September when the American division of the Chinese multinational Hangzhou Great Star Industrial Co., Ltd (Great Star), in order to avoid the publication of administrative and company secrets documents, decided to negotiate with the Akira ransomware group and pay a ransom of 1 million dollars in a BTC wallet.

The negotiation took place within a chat initiated by the ransomware group and began in the last days of August, concluding on September 2nd when the American headquarters in Huntersville, North Carolina, decided to yield to Akira’s extortion.

Akira held in its possession three databases stolen during the attack on American servers, which occurred through credentials that the ransomware group had acquired on the dark web. At least, that’s what the negotiator of the group claimed during the discussions in the chat. The negotiator Akira explained in the chat that the attack’s methods occurred through the Kerberos authentication process used by Microsoft Active Directory (Kerberoasting).

Akira  […] Initial access to your network was purchased on the dark web. Then kerberoasting was carried out and we got passwords hashes. Then we just bruted these and got domain admin password. […]

The databases belonged to three major subsidiaries of the Chinese parent company Hangzhou Great Star Industrial Co., Ltd.

[…]

In the chat, we were able to read several interesting passages. The ransom amount requested by Akira was initially set at 2 million dollars in cryptocurrency, but it later increased to 2.4 million dollars. This escalation occurred because the ransomware group had in its possession the data of two other companies connected to Hangzhou Great Star Industrial Co., Ltd.

Read more at SuspectFile.

Category: Breach IncidentsBusiness SectorMalware

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