Kyodo News reports that Japanese publishing firm Kadokawa Corporation paid Black Suit $2.98 million in cryptocurrency after a ransomware attack in June. But looking at BlackSuit’s leak site, it appears BlackSuit leaked their data anyway.
A screenshot of some of the negotiations in mid-June published by Kyodo News reveals that BlackSuit was demanding $8.25 million in ransom. The email, part of a chain that was not shown in its entirety, claimed that BlackSuit’s negotiator had been fired for accepting a payment that was too low and that “Vlad Kolesov,” who described themself as the main admin of BlackSuit, was taking over the negotiations.
The firm’s COO, Shigetaka Kurita, responded that it was almost impossible to get approval for more than $3 million. Although it was not documented in any screenshot included in the reporting, BlackSuit allegedly told Kurita they would delete data, but only if payment of $2.98 million was received within 48 hours.
Unknown Technologies confirmed records that around 44 Bitcoins worth approximately $2.98 million at the time had been sent to a cryptocurrency account on June 13.
Entries on BlackSuit’s leak site are not dated, but it appears that they leaked the data anyway. BlackSuit does not provide contact information on its website for anyone but victims, so DataBreaches was unable to contact them to ask whether they leaked data after they received payment and despite promising not to leak data if they were paid that amount. Most ransomware groups say that their word is good and that if they leak data after promising not to, future victims will not trust them. So what happened here?
Kodokawa has reportedly confirmed that the personal information of 254,241 has been leaked. The Japan Times reports that number includes information of 186,269 people related to Kadokawa Dwango Educational Institute, including N High School, a correspondence school. The leaked information also reportedly includes data on all employees of Dwango Co., a Kadokawa unit that operates the Niconico video-sharing platform, as well as the names and addresses of business partners such as artists and designers.
Update: Reportedly, there was a split in BlackSuit months ago, as RedSense describes on LinkedIn. Valéry Rieß-Marchive had an interesting write-up in September on some of the differences in writing and behavior between the two subgroups.