A cyber-terrorist group has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack that direct auction theater Christie ’s earlier this month , theNew York Times reportedon Monday .
The plan of attack , which disrupted the auction bridge house ’s website , took place just before the start of its eminent - visibility spring sales event involving more than $ 850 million worth of art , force Christie ’s to suspend online bidding and consent crack only by phone or in person .
At the time , Christie ’s described it as a “ engineering security publication , ” but now a hacker group call RansomHub has claimed that it was behind the cyberattack .
The radical claimed in a post on the dark web on Monday that it had accessed sensible information about flush art collectors from around the world , and jeopardise to release the data at the end of May if an agreement — presumably involve a large sum of money — is n’t accomplish before then .
The New York Times said in its report that it was “ not immediately possible to swan RansomHub ’s call , ” but contribute that a numeral of cybersecurity experts confirmed the existence of RansomHub and draw the group ’s title about the attack as “ plausible . ”
Commenting on the incident , a spokesperson for Christie ’s tell in a release : “ Our investigations specify there was unauthorized access by a third political party to parts of Christie ’s internet . [ We ] also determined that the group behind the incident took some limited amount of personal data relating to some of our clients . There is no evidence that any financial or transactional phonograph recording were compromise . ”
In its substance on the dark World Wide Web seen by the New York Times , the cyberpunk group say it had “ attempt to come to a reasonable closure with [ Christie ’s ] , but they quit communicating halfway through . ”
The group sum that if it posts the information containing information on the auction ’s family ’s clients , Christie ’s “ will get heavy fines ” under the GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ) , a part of European privacy law and human right law .
RansomHub also claimed to be behind a cyberattack on Change Healthcare originally this yr in which it said it manage to steal four terabytes of data containing details on patients . sooner this month , the CEO of Change Healthcare parent UnitedHealth Groupadmitted to paying a $ 22 millionransom to the hacker in a bidding to protect patient data .
Ransomware attacks arebecoming increasingly common , with criminals raking in huge aggregate of money every year . The FBI has pronounce it does not back compensate a ransom in response to a ransomware blast , as it does n’t guarantee that data will not be expose and will only boost more attacks .
