The BlackBasta Ransomware Gang's Attack on Marchant Schmidt

The BlackBasta ransomware gang has attacked Marchant Schmidt. Marchant Schmidt is a food-cutting solutions manufacturer headquartered in Bromsgrove, England. BlackBasta posted Marchant Schmidt to its data leak site on June 15th and has since published all available data.

BlackBasta is a more recent RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) player that first emerged in early 2022 and is assessed by some researchers to be a revival of the Conti and REvil attack groups. Considering they had just emerged in the spring of 2022, BlackBasta quickly became one of the most prolific attack groups, with more than 100 known victims. Ransom demands vary depending on the targeted organization, with reports that they can be as high as $2 million dollars.

BlackBasta continues to evolve their RaaS platform, with ransomware payloads that can infect systems running both Windows and Linux systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in VMware ESXi running on enterprise servers and uses both ChaCha20 and RSA-4096 for rapid encryption of the targeted network and, in some cases leverages malware strains like Qakbot and exploits like PrintNightmare during the infection process.

BlackBasta typically targets manufacturing, transportation, construction and related services, telecommunications, the automotive sector, and more. BlackBasta also employs a double extortion scheme and maintains an active leaks website where they post exfiltrated data if an organization declines to pay the ransom demand.