Pierluigi Paganini October 20, 2020

The Nefilim ransomware operators have posted a long list of files that appear to belong to Italian eyewear and eyecare giant Luxottica.

Luxottica Group S.p.A. is an Italian eyewear conglomerate and the world’s largest company in the eyewear industry. As a vertically integrated company, Luxottica designs, manufactures, distributes and retails its eyewear brands, including LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Apex by Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and Glasses.com. Its best known brands are Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. Luxottica also makes sunglasses and prescription frames for designer brands such as Chanel, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Miu Miu, and Tory Burch.

Luxottica employs over 80,000 people and generated 9.4 billion in revenue for 2019.

On September 18, the company was hit by a cyberattack, some of the web sites operated by the company were not reachable, including Ray-Ban, Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, EyeMed, and Pearle Vision.

Italian media outlets reported that the operations at the plants of Luxottica in Agordo and Sedico (Italy) were disrupted due to a computer system failure. Union sources confirmed that the personnel at the plants received an SMS in which they were notified that “the second workshift of today 21 September is suspended” due to “serious IT problems”.

BleepingComputer website, citing the security firm Bad Packets, speculates that the Italian was using a Citrix ADX controller device vulnerable to the critical CVE-2019-19781 vulnerability in Citrix devices.

At the time Luxottica has yet to release any official statement on the attack.

Security experts believe that threat actor exploited the above flaw to infect the systems at the company with ransomware.

Now we have more information about the incident, that seems to be the result of a ransomware attack.

The popular Italian cyber security expert Odysseus first revealed on the web site “Difesa e Sicurezza” that the Nefilim ransomware operators have posted a long list of files that appear to belong to Luxottica.

The huge trove of files appears to be related to the personnel office and finance departments.

The analysis of the leaked files revealed that they contain confidential information regarding the recruitment process, professional resumes, and info about the internal structures of the Group’s human resource department.

The exposed financial data includes budgets, marketing forecast analysis, and other sensitive data.

Nefilim ransomware operators also published a message which accuses Luxottica of having failed the properly manage the attack.

In the past months, the number of ransomware attacks surged, numerous ransomware gangs made the headlines targeting organizations worldwide and threating the victims of releasing the stolen data if the ransom was not paid.

“Extortion it’s the “new deal” of the cybercrime: now, more than in the past, companies can’t “hide” the cyber attack anymore. Now it becomes mandatory “manage” the breach from the communication perspective: dissembling is useless and harmful.” explained Odysseus. “And again, defend the companies from the cyber attacks becomes even more strategic: data leaks damages can generate tremendus amount of costs for companies worldwide.”

One of the crews that adopted this double-extortion model is the Nefilim ransomware gang that targeted several organizations including the mobile network operator Orange,  the independent European leader in multi-technical services The SPIE Group, the German largest private multi-service provider Dussman Group.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Luxottica)

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