German enterprise solutions giant Software AG revealed last week that it had been targeted by cybercriminals with the Clop ransomware.
Software AG operates across more than 70 countries around the world and it has over 5,000 employees. It claims that its solutions are used by more than 10,000 of the world’s biggest brands.
The company disclosed the incident on October 5, when it reported being hit by a malware attack on October 3. Software AG said at the time that it had shut down some internal systems in response to the breach.
The company said its helpdesk services and internal communications were impacted, but claimed that cloud-based services were not affected and that it found no evidence of customer information being compromised.
However, in an update shared on October 8, the company said the malware had not been fully contained and it had found evidence that the attackers did in fact download data from servers and employee notebooks.
Researchers at MalwareHunterTeam said on Saturday that the attack involved the Clop ransomware, and they noticed what appeared to be a new feature — the use of wevtutil.exe to clear event logs. They also noted that the sample that hit Software AG checked for the presence of McAfee software and attempted to uninstall it, but it’s unclear if the attackers somehow learned that the target was using McAfee products or if this functionality was added to the malware for a different target.
The Tor-hosted website where the group behind the Clop ransomware leaks data stolen from victims that refuse to pay the ransom claims that the first part of the stolen files will be made public soon.
Screenshots posted by the hackers show that they have obtained tens of gigabytes of data representing more than one million files. They appear to have obtained passport copies, invoices, and emails.
Bleeping Computer has learned from the Clop payment page associated with Software AG that the attackers have asked for more than 2,000 bitcoin, which is roughly $23 million.
SecurityWeek has reached out to Software AG for confirmation of the ransom demand and will update this article if the company responds.
The Clop ransomware is also known to have targeted the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, which revealed earlier this year that it had paid a $240,000 ransom in response to the attack.
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Related: University Project Tracks Ransomware Attacks on Critical Infrastructure
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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