BlackCat Back In Action, Italian Asset Management Company Azimut Experiences Cyber Attack

The Italian asset manager, Azimut, announced on Monday 24 July that they had been victims of cyber attacks that did not harm their customer's sensitive data, and they also rejected the ransom request.

Israel's hacking monitoring startup, DarkFeed, stated that the attack was carried out by BlackCat, a ransomware hacking group that in September had previously stolen large amounts of data from the state-owned Italian energy service company GSE.

DarkFeed, which is based in Tel Aviv, said on their website that Azimut had been attacked on July 21 and included as one of the 477 BlackCat victims. Azimut did not provide comment immediately.

BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, emerged at the end of 2021 and is known for carrying out sophisticated attacks on many companies in the United States and Europe.

"The action does not affect data or information that can provide access to the personal position of clients and financial advisors or the implementation of transactions without permission," Azimut said in a statement.

Cybersecurity company from California, Palo Alto, also stated that BlackCat was behind the attack.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said hackers wrote on their leaked information site that they had stolen more than 500GB (Gigabyte) of classified data from Azimut, which was one of the 23 organizations targeted for the attack in July.

Based on the tracking of the leak site carried out by Palo Alto, BlackCat is the second most active multi-extortion ransomware group, after LockBit.

"We have seen a number of industries target them, including law firms, engineering companies, health care systems, manufacturing, and others," said Palo Alto.

Azimut, which manages assets worth 85 billion euros (IDR 1,413 trillion), more than half are in Italy, stated that they have detected unauthorized access to their IT systems as part of normal monitoring activities.

The company has notified relevant authorities and implemented internal security procedures that "has succeeded in limiting the impact of these criminal acts," they said in a statement.