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The founder of the billionaire Invenergy has been hit by hacker extortion attempts

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The clean energy company Invenergy said on Friday that it had been hacked, but that it had “no intention of paying any ransom” after one of the world’s most popular rescue teams threatened to leak embarrassing details about its chief executive billionaire.

The Chicago-based private company, known for building large wind and solar parks, said it was “investigating unauthorized activities in some of its information systems” and complying with all regulations requiring disclosure of data breaches.

Invenergy said its operations did not cause an attack, adding: “Invenergy has not paid and has no intention of paying any ransom.”

Admission to Russia-linked REvil, one of the most prolific criminal ransomware hacking posters, said it put the company at risk on its dark website, downloading 4 terabytes of information on projects and contracts, according to screens seen by FT. .

Michael Polsky also claimed that he had “very personal and painful” information about the company’s CEO. According to Hacker, it includes emails from the energy tycoon, dangerous photos and details about his divorce from his first wife, Maya Polsky. Invenergy has not commented on the claims.

Mr. Polsky raised $ 1.5 billion by building electricity companies in 1976 after emigrating from Soviet Ukraine with $ 500 to the United States. According to Forbes. In 2007, a judge ruled that Mrs. Polsky should be awarded half of her husband’s money and hourly assets — about $ 180 million — were one of the most expensive divorces in an hour’s history.

The Invenergy incident is one of the growing ills of cybercrime activity. This has led to ransomware attacks, which means that hackers only release data when they intercept it and pay a ransom, which can worsen a victim’s business, as in the latest Colonial Pipe hack. USA.

In recent months the victims of REvil have joined Quanta is a Taiwanese supplier to Apple and the FBI has also accused the group of being behind the attack last week meat packer JBS.

Recently, ransomware teams have started threatening to leak data as leverage to pressure payment targets. Many make it a “getaway” on dark websites where they will post threats against targets and then post stolen data if they refuse to pay for those targets.

Some hacking groups say they switched to an exfiltration model known as “extortionware,” based solely on the threat of reputable damage to gain payment, usually in cryptocurrencies.

Invenergy said the attackers “did not encrypt the data,” and suggested that REvil chose not to encrypt the company’s data and suspend the business, or that an encryption attempt failed.

“It simply came to our notice then. . . using increasingly embarrassing information that they get, against executives who may have an impact on deciding whether to pay or not, ”said Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the Emsisoft cybersecurity team.

“Unfortunately, it ‘s probably a strategy that works [if] the claims are false, some companies may be willing to pay to eliminate the embarrassing situation. ”

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