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Montreal North, a borough of the city of Montreal, has suffered an alleged cyber attack at the hands of the infamous Rhysida ransomware gang.
One of 19 boroughs of the French-speaking city, Montreal North, was listed on Rhysida’s dark web leak site over the weekend.
While the details of the allegedly exfiltrated data have not been specified, the group posted a data sample, which appears to contain email screenshots, passports, contracts and other documents. However, the sample is a low-resolution image and the specifics of the data cannot be confirmed.
“With just 7 days on the clock, seize the opportunity to bid on exclusive, unique, and impressive data,” said Rhysida.
“Open your wallets and be ready to buy exclusive data. We sell only to one hand, no reselling, you will be the only owner!”
The threat group set the cost of the data at 10 bitcoin, the equivalent of roughly A$1.64 million,
Montreal North is yet to release a public statement acknowledging the claims. Cyber Daily has attempted to reach out to the city of Montreal for more information.
Last year, the Rhysida ransomware gang also claimed a ransomware attack on the city of Columbus, Ohio.
The incident resulted in system outages across email and other resources for public agencies.
While the city believes no data was encrypted, Rhysida claimed to have stolen 6.5 terabytes of data, 45 per cent of which (260,000 files over 3.1 terabytes) was published when the city refused to pay the ransom.
Initially, Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther said the data leaked was of no value and that the attack had not been effective.
However, cyber researcher David Leroy Ross, better known as Connor Goodwolf, called out the mayor, accusing him of a false claim, and shared with the media what the leak included.
When Ginther responded saying the data was unusable as it was “encrypted or corrupted”, Goodwolf then shared samples with the media to prove that the data was unencrypted.
This data included Social Security numbers of police and criminals, names from domestic violence cases, and other personal information.
Columbus then submitted a lawsuit against Goodwolf, saying that the sharing of stolen data was illegal and careless and that the data was inaccessible by the majority of people, as it was published on a platform that required expertise to access.
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