Security News > 2021 > December > New 'Karakurt' hacking group focuses on data theft and extortion
The hacking group calls itself 'Karakurt' and is a financially motivated threat actor that has ramped up its cyber-attacks in Q3 2021.
The actors focus almost exclusively on data exfiltration and extortion and are not using ransomware to lock their victims' files.
The threat group claims to have compromised over 40 victims between September and November 2021 and has posted downloadable stolen file packs on its sites.
"In one intrusion, Accenture Security also observed the threat group avoiding the use of common post-exploitation tools or commodity malware in favor of credential access," explained the report by Accenture.
For this reason, new hacking groups like SnapMC are focusing solely on data exfiltration and extortion as their threat model.
Paying a ransom doesn't guarantee that threat actors will wipe stolen data or that it won't be sold to others, so it is never wise to pay a ransom solely to prevent a data breach.