Security News > 2022 > March > UK police arrest 7 hacking suspects – have they bust the LAPSUS$ gang?
A] large-scale social engineering and extortion campaign against multiple organizations, with some seeing evidence of destructive elements.
More recent campaigns have expanded to include organizations globally spanning a variety of sectors.
Based on observed activity, this group understands the interconnected nature of identities and trust relationships in modern technology ecosystems and targets telecommunications, technology, IT services and support companies - to leverage their access from one organization to access the partner or supplier organizations.
Fascinatingly, Microsoft notes that the LAPSUS$ crew went public even while that data theft was in progress.
The Microsoft security team wryly noted that "[t]his public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact.
Most ransomware extortions, whether they're old-school ransom notes offering decryption keys to unlock scrambled files, or whether they follow the more recent cybercrime path of blackmailing companies in return for not leaking, selling or dumping stolen data.