Dozens of companies have data dumped online by ransomware ring seeking leverage

Enlarge (credit: Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The Maze ransomware ring has taken extortion to new heights by publicly posting breached data on the Internet-and threatening full dumps of stolen data if the ring's "customers" don't pay for their files to be unencrypted. But the group appears to be making one exception: the City of Pensacola, which was hit by Maze ransomware in December.

On the group's website, the administrator of Maze's ransomware operations posted:

We are going to make a gift to City of Pensacola: we will not publish leaked private data, but we publish the list of leak data and hosts to proof [sic], that we did it, we really hacked City of Pensacola.

Just before Christmas, the Maze operators had posted 2GB of data from the city's systems, claiming it was only 10 percent of what had been stolen from systems before the attackers launched their ransomware attack. But the files were then removed, with only directory data, computer names, and IP addresses left on the site as proof of compromise. Based on the Maze site, 28 servers were hit by the attack.

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