Avaddon Ransomware gang hacked France-based Acer Finance and AXA Asia

Avaddon ransomware gang has breached the France-based financial consultancy firm Acer Finance.

Avaddon ransomware gang made the headlines again, the cybercrime gang has breached the France-based financial consultancy firm Acer Finance.

Acer Finance operates as an investment management company. The Company offers risk management, mutual funds, analysis, financial planning, and advisory services. Acer Finance serves individuals, entrepreneurs, and institutional investors in France.

The Avaddon ransomware gang is giving Acer Finance 240 hours to communicate and cooperate with them before start leaking the stolen valuable company documents.

The ransomware gang claims to have stolen confidential company information about clients and employees.

“You can congratulate us on the successful attack on the company, we also have about a lot of confidential information of clients, a lot of confidential information of employees, banking, personal correspondence, contracts, agreements, forms of payment, a lot of data from the secretariat, licenses and much more.” reads the statement published by the group on its leak site.

The hackers pointed out that there is no way to decrypt data without their decryptor, they also threatened the company to target it with a DDoS attack in case they will refuse to pay the ransom.

As proof of the hack, the group published several ID cards, personal documents, contracts, and a screenshot of the folders containing stolen data.

The group also announced to have hacked the Asian branch of Axa and stole three terabytes of data

It is curious that recently Axa announced that in France it will no longer reimburse ransomware payments for its customers. The decision is the result of the increased number of ransomware attacks and the large ransom demanded by cybercriminals.

Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) warned of an ongoing Avaddon ransomware campaign targeting organizations worldwide in multiple industries, including government, finance, energy, manufacturing, and healthcare.

The alert published by the ACSC provides a list of countries under attack which includes the US, UK, Germany, France, China, Italy Brazil, India, UAE, France, and Spain.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Avaddon)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.