Hackers won’t get the $70 million they want in a ransomware attack

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Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan told CNBC on Tuesday that an international ransomware attack that began with Florida-based IT company Kaseya would not bring in the full $70 million that Russia-linked hackers are requesting.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone paid the ransom to be closer to $40 [million] to $50 million,” said Hanslovan, whose cybersecurity firm Kaseya has been helping incident response and disaster recovery since Friday’s breach.

“However, I have not seen anything to suggest that Kaseya will pay for a global decryption, that is, that decrypts both its customers and their customers,” Hanslovan added in an interview with Squawk Box.

The REvil hacker gang is publicly demanding $70 million in cryptocurrency to unlock data from the attack, which has spread to hundreds of small and medium businesses in dozens of countries.

Jack Cable of Krebs Stamos Group that focuses on cybersecurity told Reuters that one of the group’s affiliates, in a private conversation, had already expressed a willingness to lower the asking price for “global decryption” to $50 million. While it can be difficult to determine who is speaking on behalf of the hackers, Cable said his conversations indicate that they are “certainly unrelated” to their $70 million request.

Kaseya CEO Fred Fukulla said Monday that between 800 and 1,500 businesses were affected by the attack, and the fallout is expected to continue on Tuesday as people return to the office after the Fourth of July weekend.

“My guess would be [that the] The total number of companies, and from everything we’ve seen, hackers don’t have a feedback loop on how many people have been hacked,” Hanslovan said, adding that the hacker’s claims of infecting 1 million systems are just a ‘bragging’.

Cyber ​​security experts said the gang targeted software supplier Kaseya using a network management package to spread ransomware across cloud service providers. The hack led to the temporary closing of hundreds of Coop grocery stores in Sweden after cash registers were closed. It has also affected more than 10 schools and several kindergartens in New Zealand.

The company is headquartered in Miami and has offices throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

“Everyone has been woken up by a simultaneous attack. What this means is that they are targeting managed service providers, which is a kind of unilateral attack that affects many industries,” Hanslovan said, noting that healthcare companies, law firms and even federal entities have faced similar attacks.

On Sunday, the White House said it was reaching out to victims of the attack “to provide assistance based on a national risk assessment.”

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