Dan Adams reports:
Marijuana shops across the country, including seven medical dispensaries in Massachusetts, are being affected by the apparent hack of a sales and inventory system widely used in the cannabis industry.
[…]
MJ Freeway, a Denver company whose “seed-to-sale” tracking software is used by hundreds of marijuana companies to comply with state regulations, said its main servers and backup system each went down Sunday morning and remained offline as of Monday afternoon.
[…]
A spokeswoman for MJ Freeway said the outage, first reported by the industry publication Marijuana Business Daily, was the work of unknown hackers.
[…]
Ward said encryption prevented the hackers from reading data about MJ Freeway’s retail clients, which include five nonprofits in charge of seven medical dispensaries in Massachusetts, or those shops’ patients and customers. But the attackers did succeed in corrupting, or garbling, the data and making it unusable. The company has not received a demand for ransom or any other communication from the alleged hackers, she added.
Read more on Boston Globe.
Okay, this is interesting. Did the hacker(s) intend to corrupt the data or was that a byproduct of a failed attempt to access/exfiltrate encrypted data? What was the motivation behind this attack? To get data for extortion? To interfere with access to marijuana? To try to cross-match with another database for political purposes? Something else?
probably a government ordered deal