by Washington (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google said that Hackers are sending extortion -e -mails to a non -specific number of managers from different companies, who claim that they have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle Business applications.
In a statement, Google said that a group that claimed the relationship with the ransomware gang CL0P sent e-mails to “managers at numerous organizations that claimed that they had stolen sensitive data from their Oracle e-business suite.”
Google warned that “currently does not have sufficient evidence to definitively assess the truthfulness of these claims.”
Cynthia Kaiser, the head of the Ransomware Research Center of CyberSecurity, said that her company had seen extortion requirements “in the seven or eight digit range”, with the highest at “$ 50 million”.
Kaiser noted a dispute about the connection with CL0P, but said there are early indications that the perpetrators may be connected to the group.
“There is so much overlap between all these groups, and there are copycats in the ecosystem,” said Kaiser, adding that additional information will help paint a clearer picture in the coming days.
Messages looking for comments from CL0P and Oracle were not returned. Google described the e-mail campaign as “large volume”, but refused to share further details.
(Reporting by Raphael Sattter in Washington and AJ Vicens in Detroit, Michigan.editing by Shri Navaratnam and Diane Craft)
