Shoprite faces gang ransom extortion
Africa’s largest supermarket chain that has three thousand stores across twelve nations in the African region, has been hit by a ransomware attack. The supermarket chain has a revenue of $5.8 billion and close to 150,000 employees.
The chain is home to the people of Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Angola, Madagascar and other countries in the continent. Last Friday, the company had said they had gone through a security issue, with warning signs in Eswatini, Namibia and Zambia. The confidential information might have been in the hands of a cybercrime.
“Additional security measures to protect against further data loss were implemented by amending authentication processes and fraud prevention and detection strategies to protect customer data,” the firm made a statement.
RansomHouse, the ransomware gang has taken the responsibility for the attack, with an evidence of 600GB of data stolen from the retailer during the cyber attack.
“Access to affected areas of the network has also been locked down. The data compromise included names and ID numbers, but no financial information or bank account numbers.” the company added.
The gang claims that they do not engage in any sort of encryption and only perform data theft and extortion. However, the supermarket chain has not confirmed anything about any business disruption or operational problems.