Beverage Giant Lion Faced Monero Ransom Attack Of $1M

The Beverage giant LION from Australia faced a Monero ransom attack by the ransomware gang ReVil which marks a second attack on the company in less than one week. In today’s Monero news, we read more about the attack.

The cybercriminals behind the attack threaten to double the ransom attack if the beverage giant doesn’t pay the amount by the specified date. The currency of choice for the particular attack is, of course, Monero. A report published by Sydney Morning Herald back on June 18, said that the Lion staff was informed that the attack had disrupted its IT infrastructure. The ransomware gang Revil asked for an $800,000 ransom to be paid in monero and if Lion fails to send this amount before June 19 which is today, the group will demand a ransom of $1,600,000.

The first attack that the Australian beverage giant suffered was on June 9 and since then the company provided a number of updates on the official website with the latest one published on June 15. Lion contacted a multinational professional services company Accenture seeking for help on the recovery efforts. Further details on the second attack were not disclosed and in a statement provided by the news outlet iTWire, a spokeswoman commented:

“We have confirmed that Lion was the victim of a cyber attack, caused by ransomware. We are not in a position to provide any further comment.”

Brett Callow, a threat analyst and ransomware expert at malware lab Emsisoft said:

“Ransomware groups frequently create backdoors which, unless remediated, provide them with access to the target network after the initial encryption event.”

Callow spoke about another case where Revil targeted an insurance company by maintaining post-attack access to the company’s network and was able to monitor the response of the incident. They were able to access emailed transcripts of phone communications. The data was obtained by a long process of being able to access the system and the ransomware group managed to conduct an insurance fraud. Callow added:

“Post-incident, companies need to rebuild their networks and infrastructure rather than simply decrypting their data or restoring it from backups. This is the only way to eliminate the possibility of a second attack.”

Lion employs 7500 workers with a revenue of $5.6 million recorded in 2015 according to figures shown by Wikipedia. Revil on the other hand launched another series of attacks targeting three companies in Canada and the US.