According to Hunters International’s blog they have claimed to have exfiltrated 386 GB worth of data or 327,268 files. These files claim to contain PII, Top Secret, Confidential, FBI Documents, Cases, Active Cases, Surveillance, and files on Operation Turnbuckle.
While this investigation is ongoing, we can look at the US Marshals history. We know this would not be the first time they had to deal with ransomware.
In Feburary 2023, they had a breach that caused weeks and months of recover yet they tried to down play the incident..
“The incident, chief of the Marshals Service public affairs office Drew Wade said on Monday, was identified on February 17 and involved a standalone system that was immediately disconnected from the network.” – Ionut Arghire from Security Week
It is hard to say right now how they will respond to the threat. We do not currently know what systems are compromised or even if this accusation is a false claim! If it ends up being confirmed then we have a new issue..
- They can either pay the ransom and have the world know that they are willing and able to pay for their data to be ransom.
- They pay hush money specifically just to not release anything.
- They pay nothing and hope they didn’t get any life threatening data
Ransomware is definitely an interesting conversation. How much is data worth to you? How much is worth to keep the employees or agents confidential?
As more information comes out we will update this article.
Update 8/28/2024: a spokes person for the US Marshal denies that this is a new incident. The data posted on the blog is likely from the previous breach.
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