Description

Australian company operating in various regions worldwide, Ainsworth Game Technology, was attacked by the Medusa ransomware gang. On December 10, the Medusa gang published the list of the company on its leak site hosted on the dark web, stating that it had compromised 852.4 GB of data. The hackers claimed to have stolen business documents, employee information consisting of names, birth dates, email addresses, bank details, and passports among other confidential files. A big proportion of the data is from Medusa's Australian operations. The company has released a ransom of $1.2 million and promises to dump the data online in two weeks if its demand isn't met. Ainsworth Game Technology has not commented about the breach, and even attempts to contact the company for an official statement have been failed. This attack is in line with similar activities conducted by the Medusa ransomware group, which previously attacked Compass Group, a North Sydney-based food and services company, in September. According to Medusa, they have stolen 785.5 gigabytes of data from Compass Group and are demanding $2 million in ransom money. The company activated its incident response plan, engaged forensic experts, and disabled affected systems in the response to mitigate the threat. The Medusa activities indicate the increasing trend of ransomware attacks targeting large corporations. The ransom demands are in millions, and sometimes it can extend for an additional fee as seen with Compass Group. This has raised the pressure on organizations to build better cybersecurity measures and be quick in reacting to data breaches as these attacks increase.