Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Riya
An Indian merchant platform company, namely Pine Labs was founded in 1998, providing sponsors and last-mile retail transaction technology. Recently, the company experienced a ransomware attack. Around 500 records were hacked, consisting of confidential client agreements, financial reports, and other internal docs.
A ransomware group named BlackMatter is considered to be the assailant. The group’s post reflected the hacked data to be of around 100GB, out of which 500MB was leaked as a sample. The company’s agreement, invoices, along with financial institutions and Indian banks were leaked. Cyble revealed that the cyber attack was exposed after the BlackMatter ransomware group updated its victim list on Dark Web on August 10, 2021.
The attack appears to be quite significant, as initial investigations indicate that the incident has affected multiple financial institutions using Pine Labs services across India. Although the company’s Chief Technology Officer, Sanjeev Kumar considered it to be baseless and assured Pine Labs to be one of the most secure and compliant PCI-DSS platforms. And will continue to keep its system and customer data safe at all costs.
Even though, after Sanjeev’s denial Sunny Nehra, the admin of cybersecurity firm HACK & SECURITY, reveals that the sample data set proves that the breach took place at Pine Labs. And employee’ or client systems can be a gateway. He added that the employee’s systems of Pine Labs could be an easy target for a ransomware attack. But he believes that the company didn’t share any such confidential business agreements with the employees.
Meanwhile, Pine Labs’ system was hacked and would require to conduct a thorough survey.A recent survey brought some crucial info to the limelight; During the past, most breaches were done by REvil and DarkSide Ransomware groups. But, most likely they now have combined their forces emerging together as BlackMatter, majorly focusing on financial institutions.