Alice Richardson reports:
The company in charge of Trafford’s bin collections and cleaning the borough’s street has suffered a major cyber attack and sensitive personal, financial and commercial details have been leaked.
Amey PLC, which has a super contract with Trafford council to manage its infrastructure, was targeted by Mount Lock ransomware group in an incident the company has labelled ‘complex’.
[…]
It’s understood that the ransomware attack began in mid-December 2020 and is ongoing. The group behind the attack, Mount Locker, are demanding $2billion from the firm.
Read more on Manchester Evening News. (h/t, @Chum1ng0)
I hope that the “b” in $2billion was just Manchester Evening News confusing the $2B entry for “revenue” on the leak site with the ransom demand, but DataBreaches.net has reached out to ask Mount Locker to confirm that.
Mount Locker did start dumping Amey’s data on their dedicated leak site, and by now, they have dumped all 143 GB they claim to have exfiltrated. But they are not the only threat actor(s) dumping Amey’s data. DataBreaches.net had also noted that CL0P was dumping Amey data, too, and they claim to have dumped more than 200 GB, with screenshots and samples also provided on their leak site.
When Maze team closed their project, they denied that there had ever been any cartel. But the collaboration between threat actors has been noted a number of times by then and since then. In Amey’s case, DataBreaches.net had also been contacted by Conti threat actors to point DataBreaches.net towards the Mount Locker Amey attack and dump. When asked whether they had collaborated in the attack, a spokesperson for Conti informed DataBreaches.net that no, they had not been involved in the attack, but were just helping disseminate news of it.
So that’s three different groups involved in some way with the Amey attack. And there’s probably a lot more collaboration going in other attacks that we do not yet know about.
But if multiple teams or threat actors have copies of the data, that is even more reason NOT to believe any promises that data will be destroyed and not disseminated further. The more groups that are involved, the greater the risks.