Colleges and schools Great goal For cybercriminals, so the fact that a ransom gang broke into a Virginia university last month isn’t entirely surprising. What He is What is surprising is what the ransomware gang did next. In a bold move, the Gang kidnapped The school’s emergency communications system, where it uses it to spam students and faculty through threatening SMS messages and brags about its victory in the latest hack.
The unfortunate victim in this case – Bluefield University – is a private Baptist university located in it western Virginia. On April 30, Bluefield disclosed to students and faculty that it had been hacked but claimed to have seen no evidence of “financial fraud or identity theft” as a result of the incident. Not to be outdone, the gang responsible for the hack—a group known as “Avos” (or “AvosLocker”)—decided to put his two cents into it.
On May 1, about a day after Bluefield exposed the hacking ring, Avos apparently used its access to the school’s network Take control from the emergency broadcasting system. Bluefield uses a system called RamAlert describes it “An emergency wireless notification system that was created in an effort to enhance communication with students, parents, faculty, and staff in times of crisis on campus.” DrDuring the recent crisis of the Avos ransomware attack, it wasn’t administrators who controlled the system but hackers – who used it to notify students and faculty alike that the university’s network had officially been hacked and its data stolen. A message was sent to Campus Pioneers saying:
Hello Bluefield University students! We are Avoslocker Ransomware. We hacked into the university’s network to extract 1.2 terabytes of files… We have admissions data from thousands of students. Your personal information is at risk of being leaked on the darkweb blog.”
“Do not allow the university to lie about the severity of the attack! As evidence, we leaked the sample on Monday 1 May 2023 18:00:00 GMT (2:00:00 PM)”
The gang also said that they would “continue to attack (the school) if the university president does not pay.”
After the incident, Blofeld was released Another statement Acknowledging that Avos has “affected our comprehensive alert system, RAMAlert” and warning students not to “click on any links an individual provides or respond to.”
This is an unusual turn of events and a somewhat theatrical move on the part of the Avos ransomware gang. It was clearly a move designed to intimidate the school principals into giving in to the gang’s demands.
You could argue that it is part of a broader pattern in which ransomware gangs have gotten more aggressive and creative in how they carry out attacks. More and more, gangs seem to be looking for new ways to intimidate victims, trying to get a successful ransom. Another example of this Att. Recentlyack in the Minneapolis Public Schools system in In which a gang leaked sensitive psychological data of students to the web and Strongly promoted material on traditional social media channels. Like the Blofeld incident, this showed a gang using everything at their disposal to make paying the gang seem like an attractive option.