Zack Whittaker and Carly Page report:
The number of victims affected by a mass-ransomware attack, caused by a bug in a popular data transfer tool used by businesses around the world, continues to grow as another organization tells TechCrunch that it was also hacked.
Canadian financing giant Investissement Québec confirmed to TechCrunch that “some employee personal information” was recently stolen by a ransomware group that claimed to have breached dozens of other companies. Spokesperson Isabelle Fontaine said the incident occurred at Fortra, previously known as HelpSystems, which develops the vulnerable GoAnywhere file transfer tool.
Hitachi Energy also confirmed this week that some of its employee data had been stolen in a similar incident involving its GoAnywhere system, but saying the incident happened at Fortra.
Read more at TechCrunch to find out more about the victims they’ve contacted or who have confirmed or denied to them. As DataBreaches understands it, however, this was not a true ransomware attack, as there was no locker involved. Clop reportedly exfiltrated data and then attempted to extort victims to pay them to delete the data they had stolen.
Possible victims in the healthcare sector
On February 13, Community Health Systems disclosed in an 8-K filing that they had been affected and approximately one million patients were involved. The Tennessee health system was the first medical entity to disclose that they had been affected.
Since then, a number of medically-related or health-related entities have recently been listed on Clop’s site — without any data leaks as yet — and might be linked to the Forta/GoAnywhere attack:
- Alivia Health
- Medminder
- US Wellness
- Allied Benefit
- MedEx
- WellBe
- Ace Nursing
Homewood Health in Canada was also added to Clop’s site.
None of the U.S. ones listed above, with the exception of US Wellness, appear to have issued any statements or disclosures to HHS. US Wellness issued a press release on March 16 on behalf of BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona, but Alivia Health did not respond at all to an inquiry of March 11. DataBreaches notes that ACE Nursing is not a provider but an accreditation organization.
DataBreaches will continue to track the medical or health-related entities.