- Ransomware group claims theft of large data archive from AkzoNobel
- Leaked files include sensitive personal and corporate documents
- Company confirms incident but emphasizes limited impact
Cybercriminals claimed to have recently broken into AkzoNobel and stole 170GB of data, including user emails, phone numbers, passport scans, and other sensitive data.
Based in the Netherlands, AkzoNobel is a multinational company which is one of the largest paint and coatings manufacturers in the world, whose products are used in homes, buildings, cars, industrial equipment, and elsewhere.
The attack was claimed by a ransomware operator called Anubis, which says it took close to 170,000 files, and leaked samples on its dark web page, which included screenshots of select documents and a file tree.
Limited impact
The published data reportedly contains confidential agreements with high-profile clients, email addresses and phone numbers, email conversations, passport scans, material testing documents, and internal technical spec sheets.
Following the leak, the company confirmed the news and gave more context about the breach:
“AkzoNobel has identified a security incident at one of our sites in the United States. The incident was limited to the respective site and was already contained,” the company told BleepingComputer. “The impact is limited, and we are taking the appropriate steps to notify and support impacted parties and will work closely with relevant authorities.”
It was also said that Anubis leaked only a part of the stolen archives, which could mean that it came to some sort of an arrangement with AkzoNobel. The company did not say if it spoke to the attackers or not.
Anubis is a relatively new Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation, which came into the spotlight last summer when it added a new feature to its encryptor that irreversibly destroys all encrypted files on the compromised system.
When the threat actors activate the feature, the wiper erases the contents of the files and reduces their size to 0 KB. The filenames and the structure remain intact, which means it’s impossible to recover the files.
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