The FBI has sent out an alert warning private industry partners that the HelloKitty (aka FiveHands) ransomware gang has added distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to its arsenal of extortion tactics.
In a notification last Friday, the FBI said the group would take down the official websites of its victims in DDoS attacks if they failed to meet ransom demands.
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HelloKitty is also known to steal confidential documents from victims’ compromised servers before encrypting them. The extracted files are later used as leverage to pressure victims into paying the ransom under the threat of leaking the stolen data online to a data-leakage site.
“Hello Kitty members demand varied Bitcoin ransom payments that appear tailored to each victim, according to their assessed ability to pay it. If no ransom is paid, criminals either post victim data on the Babuk website or sell it to a third-party data broker.” Said the FBI.
Who is HelloKitty?
HelloKity is a human-operated ransomware operation active since November 2020 and first observed by the FBI in January 2021.
The gang is primarily known for breaching and encrypting systems on the Projekt Red CD in February and claiming to have stolen Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Gwent and other game source code.
The group later claimed that someone had purchased the stolen files from the Projekt Red CD, although this has never been confirmed.
The FBI also shared a broad collection of indicators of compromise in its alert to help cybersecurity professionals and system administrators guard against coordinated attack attempts by the HelloKitty ransomware gang.
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