On Saturday, French clothing company Damart is being extorted for $2 million after a cyberattack from the Hive ransomware gang.
Since August 15, some of the company’s systems have been encrypted and operations have been disrupted. A report from Valery Marchive, who was able to retrieve a leaked ransom note and published details on LeMagIT, has observed that the hackers are not ready for negotiating and expect parent company Damartex to pay the full ransom.
The hackers did not post the victim on their extortion site, opting to keep negotiations private.
Marchive shares additional information with BleepingComputer that helped them to confirm the attack and extortion.
With the cybercriminals, Damart has not engaged in negotiations yet but notified the national police of the incident, making it unexpected that Hive would receive a payment.
On August 15, the first signs of trouble appears when Damart publishes a message about unscheduled maintenance on the homepage of its online store.
During that time, following a request for comment from BleepingComputer, Damart states, “Damart, the mail order clothing brand, based in Bingley, West Yorkshire, has confirmed that there was an attempt to intrude into their IT systems, which they were rapidly able to intercept with strong security protocols.”
They further stated, “As a precaution, they have temporarily restricted some services available to customers, which is why the website is currently offline. Data and system security is a top priority for the business and reassuringly there is no evidence to date that any customer data has been impacted in any way.”
On August 24, it was reported that Damart’s sales network wasn’t being operated properly and the disruption affected 92 of its stores. As a result, the number of accepted orders declined and customer support was unavailable, Bleeping Computer reports.
