Blackbyte ransomware targets San Francisco 49ers, affects the data 20k individuals

On Friday, NFL’s San Francisco 49ers mails notification letters confirming a data breach that affects more than 20,000 people following a ransomware attack that hit its network earlier this year.

The San Francisco Bay Area professional American football team has confirmed that personal information (including names and Social Security numbers) belonging to 20,930 affected people was accessed and/or stolen in the attack between February 6 and February 11, 2022.

In the notification letters sent to the affected people starting Thursday, the team reveals that the 49ers conducted a thorough review of these files to identify the individuals whose information was contained in the files, and additional research to find and verify the addresses for these individuals.

It further stated that on August 9, 2022, the 49ers finished this process and finds that the incident involved the name and Social Security numbers of seven Maine residents.

At the time, the 49ers confirmed the incident in a statement to Bleeping computer, claiming it caused a temporary disruption to portions of their IT network.

While the football team hasn’t revealed whether the hackers successfully deployed ransomware payloads, the statement said they are still restoring systems, indicating that the breached devices were also likely encrypted, Bleeping computer reports.

On February 12, The BlackByte gang claimed accountability for the attack, right as the NFL was getting ready for Super Bowl 2022, by starting to leak files claimed that were stolen from the 49ers’ network.