By Chris King • Updated: 26 Nov 2023 • 0:51
Image of a would-be cybercriminal. Credit: Fam Veld/Shutterstock.com
AFTER the Danish real estate chain EDC refused to pay a very large ransom, a Russian hacker group has published the personal information of over 1,000 clients online.
It includes copies of about 1,300 people’s passports, driving licenses, and health insurance certificates that were stolen by the pro-Russian ransomware group Black Basta earlier this month.
Contact information such as telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and addresses – including secret addresses – and almost 100,000 social security numbers are also said to have been freely distributed.
The action was confirmed to dr.dk by EDC’s information manager, Jan Nordmann. ‘It is correct. It is, as far as we know, a Russian group that co-finances war activities. We don’t want to support that, and we don’t think our customers will either’, he stated.
Black Basta specifically stole approximately 2.5 terabytes of data from the company on November 1 after allegedly accessing a backup file that had been created by human error, according to EDC. The Russian hackers did not gain entry to EDC’s main server though.
EDC has tried as far as possible to contact everyone whose information has now been published. ‘We have sent out many hundreds of thousands of emails to those whose contact details we have. But I can’t say that we have managed to get hold of all of them. We have done what we could’, Nordmann continued.
In an effort to strengthen its defences against potential similar attacks in the future, EDC has increased its security. ‘Our security level was high before, it is extremely high now’, revealed the company’s information manager.
Nordmann concluded: ‘However, these hackers are not just two schoolboys in a basement. So I can’t promise that it won’t happen again, but I can promise that at least we did everything we could’.
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Originally from Wales, Chris spent years on the Costa del Sol before moving to the Algarve where he is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com
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