HELD TO RANSOM

Russian-Speaking Ransomware Hackers Threaten to Leak Stolen D.C. Police-Informant Data

The group threatened to share details of the informants with local criminal gangs—unless police paid an unspecified ransom.

An obscure Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate has claimed responsibility after highly sensitive hacked data from the Washington, D.C. police department started leaking out on to the internet. The Babuk group, a ransomware gang that has emerged over the past year, said on its website that it had “downloaded a sufficient amount of information from your internal networks,” including top-secret data on police informants. The group threatened to share details of the informants with local criminal gangs unless police paid an unspecified ransom within three days. The District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department confirmed in a statement that it had asked the FBI to investigate the “unauthorized access” to its systems, but added that it remains unclear how severe the breach was. The police statement did not mention ransomware.