A Manhattan law firm that includes some rather famous personalities from the world of entertainment and cinema among its clients was the victim of a hacker attack that compromised over 750 gigabytes of data relating to its clientele. Hackers now threaten to make this information public unless the law firm pays a ransom.
The attack on the law firm, Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sack, led to the stealing of numerous personal and contact information, contracts and non-disclosure agreements that belong to a large number of people and prominent realities. The clientele of the law firm includes celebrities of the caliber of Robert De Niro, Mike Tyson, Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Jessica Simpson, Lady GaGa, Madonna, Meg Ryan and Naomi Campbell. But the Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sack studio also sees important companies in the technological panorama among its customers: Activision, Facebook, Samsung, Sony and Spotify.
The attack was conducted using a ransomware known as REvil or Sodinokibi. It is a ransomware already used in the last few months against high-profile targets: in January an illustrious victim was the Travelex exchange service, which paid a ransom of 2 million dollars in bitcoin. More recent is the case of a company, Brooks International, which refused to pay the ransom: in March 12GB of information was taken, containing administrative-level login credentials and credit card numbers of high-level employees, who are then been offered for sale in a hacking forum. Since Sodinokibi was first used around the middle of 2019, it has allowed criminals to collect a collective of $ 38 million, affecting around 150 realities.
The law firm confirmed to the BBC that it had been the victim of the attack and, as a statement of circumstance, communicated that it had already notified its customers and staff and that it had enlisted a competent consultancy team to deal with the situation. A ransom of $ 21 million has been requested, but the law firm does not intend to satisfy the requests of the criminals.