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Extortion Reboot: Ransomware Crew Threatens Leak to Snowden

Posted on March 19, 2025March 18, 2025 by Dissent

There are those who might say that any media coverage is valuable or desirable, but when a ransomware group winds up drawing snickers, maybe not. Kristina Beek reports:

A threat group known as Ox Thief recently tried to entice its victim to pay to protect its data by threatening to go to Edward Snowden — a former NSA intelligence contractor who became a whistleblower when he leaked classified documents about global surveillance programs in 2013.

Ox Thief didn’t begin with this tactic, however. According to analysis from Fortra, first the threat actor claimed on its Tor-based site to have stolen 47GB of sensitive files from an organization. It offered samples of the stolen data so that the victim could verify that the group’s claims were legitimate, before threatening to publish the data if the victim didn’t pay the demanded ransom — all of which are classic ransomware extortion tactics.

But things began to go awry when the threat actor started posting about the consequences that the victim would have to deal with if the ransom wasn’t paid.

Read more at Dark Reading.

Category: Malware

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