The HellCat hacker group claims to hold several dozen gigabytes of stolen data from the servers of the French company Schneider Electric.
A ransom demand that is not normal. On November 5, 2024, the French company Schneider Electric confirmed that it was the subject of a ransom demand after being the victim of a group of pirates, the Hellcat. The latter allegedly seized more than 40GB of compressed data from the group's servers.
If Schneider Electric confirms the theft of data, it nevertheless adds that the ransomware, which blocks the computer until a ransom is paid, only affected an “internal project execution monitoring platform” and that it was “in an isolated environment.”
A ransom demand for more than 40GB of data
This is not the first time that Schneider Electric has been the victim of ransomware – it is even the third time in 18 months, according to the specialist site Decrypt.co. But this time, the pirates are more creative: they first offered the company to pay the ransom… with baguettes.
125,000 dollars in baguettes were once demanded, before the pirates finally got serious and finally demanded payment in Monero. This cryptocurrency is known to better protect the privacy of its owners, which hackers hope to prevent the authorities from finding them.
The principle of ransomware is known and particularly old, but it has become increasingly widespread over the years. Some attacks have thus been able to paralyze essential establishments, such as hospitals.
These cases are therefore taken seriously by the authorities, who ask victims not to pay the ransoms, because it is never certain that they will find their data or that it will not be sold.
For Schneider Electric, the news could not come at a worse time: the French electronic equipment giant announced the sudden dismissal of its general director, the German Peter Herweck, on November 4.
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