The NBA's famous Houston Rockets are now in hot water as they investigate a recent cyber-attack against their own networks coming from a relatively new ransomware group claiming to have stolen massive amounts of internal business data. The Houston Rockets reportedly confirmed the recently attempted intrusion.
NBA Rockets R
A spokesperson for the team, Tracey Hughes, assures that the attack hasn't been able to impact the team's operations. Hughes noted that it looks like certain unknown actors actually attempted to install the ransomware on particular systems at the Rockets. It was noted that their security tools were able to prevent the ransomware from being installed except for a number of systems that have thankfully not impacted the team's operation.
Ransomware, for those unfamiliar, is a certain type of malicious code that would typically encrypt the victim's data and steal it. The hackers would then demand a ransom for them to decrypt the stolen information. More recently, a number of ransomware gangs have all tried to steal data and even threatened to make the data public unless the victim would pay the cybercriminals a fee.
NBA Breached by Babuk
In this particular case, it is still unclear as to if the attackers encrypted any of the basketball team's actual networks. The hacking group, however, known by the name Babuk, actually claims that on its dark web page, the group has stolen a whopping 500 GB of the Houston Rockets' data, according to the story by Bloomberg.
The stolen data reportedly includes critical non-disclosure agreements, contracts, and even financial data. The ransomware group is now threatening to publish the stolen information if the team would decide not to pay. These information could prove critical to the Houston Rockets since it contains certain things that are meant not to be seen by the public.
Babuk Ransomware Group
Hughes, the Rocket spokesperson, noted that the team is well aware of the recent hacker's claims but still did not comment on their veracity or even regarding the whole scope of the compromise. The public extortion ad on Babuk's official dark web page was then removed on Wednesday.
Babuk is known as the latest hacking group to utilize pages on the dark web in order to try to publicly extort victims into actually paying the ransom demands. Babuk was only discovered some time earlier this year and has already compromised at least a total of five big enterprises. It was reported that one victim even had to pay the group as much as $85,000 after they had negotiated.
The group was described by security researchers over at McAfee. The group also advertises both Russian-speaking and English-speaking dark web forms. However, the group is focusing directly on the Russian sites in order to recruit affiliates and proceed to distribute its own malware, also reported by MSN.
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Written by Urian Buenconsejo
