LockBit Claims to Have Breached Fed's Database, Threatens to Release Sensitive Info

TapTechNews On June 25, the hacker group LockBit claimed to have breached the Fed's database and threatened to release the stolen 33 terabytes of sensitive information containing Americans' banking secrets if the ransom was not paid.

LockBit's announcement shows that the Fed has been listed as a victim of LockBit 3.0, with the note You'd better hire another negotiator within 48 hours and fire the idiot who only offers $50,000 for Americans' banking data.

Of course, the Fed has remained silent these past two days, but the tension has spread globally. If this attack is confirmed, it could become one of the most serious financial data leaks in history.

The ransom payment deadline given by LockBit is 4 a.m. Beijing time on June 26, and there is now less than 24 hours until the deadline.

The industry believes that this attack against the Fed may not rule out the possibility of being retaliatory behavior (TapTechNews note: The U.S. government announced last week the ban on the sale and use of Kaspersky and sanctioned 12 Kaspersky executives) or bluffing (LockBit suffered a fatal blow from the FBI's joint Cronos operation with law enforcement departments in several countries including the UK and the US in February this year).

In addition, the U.S. Treasury Department accused Dimitry Yuryevich Khoroshev on May 7 as the mastermind behind LockBit.

Morgan Wright, the chief security advisor of SentinelOne and a columnist for SCMedia, said that this attack was in line with the attack pattern of other Russian hacker groups, often retaliation for actual or perceived actions.

However, no one has been able to prove that LockBit's ransom attack against the Fed is true for now, and Wright emphasized that if LockBit didn't actually hack into the Fed, then such a false statement would seriously damage the organization's credibility.