Pay a $1.7 Million Ransom or Else...

Hackers are getting smarter. To improve their chances of getting paid, hacker groups have added data exfiltration to their Ransomware. At best, this dramatically raises recovery costs, and at worst, causes irreparable damage to victims.

Here's the latest story:
After the infamous Maze Ransomware crew compromised New Jersey-based MDLab, they demanded 200 Bitcoins (about $1.7 million as of this writing).

"Ransom amount: 100 BTC + 100 BTC. One part is for decryption, the second is for data destruction." - Online forum post by Maze Ransomware

After the company refused to pay the ransom, the criminals made good on their threats. To coerce the company to pay up, the criminals released data stolen from the 231 infected workstations. This is the digital world's equivalent of cutting off fingers until a ransom is paid.

In an online forum, Maze says that "another company [MDLab] refused to work with us and thought that they can get away with this."

The Maze criminals released a treasure trove of sensitive company data and claimed there's more to come.

Because MDL doesn't want to continue the dialog we will now present to the forum members their private research data. Check out immunology research, very interesting stuff. - Maze Ransomware Team

Needless to say, this attack is proving to be disastrous for the company. There's also never any assurance that the stolen data is erased.

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