Here is the story from scmagazine:

MOVEit hackers may have found simpler business model beyond ransomware

“The Russian-speaking hacker group Cl0p confirmed it exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the popular MOVEit file transfer program and stole data from a growing number of victims, exposing the personal information of many millions of people worldwide.”

 

What can be simpler than ransomware?  Well, in ransomware one has to develop encryption and code to encrypt.  But more important one has to undo the whole thing to bring back the data.

What if something goes wrong and the
“client”   errr “victim”  does not get data back? Now next victim does not have incentive to pay the criminal.

So they are always looking for more methods to make money.

So what happened is they found a flaw in the MOVEit FTP(file transfer  program).

Now they found out who is using it by hacking the company and then they were able to steal a bunch of data from unsuspecting users of MOVEit .

 

Once they had the data they were able to figure out how to make money off it, which means essentially criminal will release data to the world unless you pay them.

So I guess a pure extortion racket with some stealing is cheaper than promising to develop software to encrypt and decrypt that works)

Any way be careful out there and use software that is legitimate and developed well.

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