BlackCat/ALPHV Ransomware Gang Attacks First Judicial Circuit of Florida

BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware gang has attacked First Judicial Circuit of Florida. The First Judicial Circuit of Florida is a judicial circuit within the state of Florida's court system. It encompasses four counties in the western part of the Florida Panhandle. Each judicial circuit in Florida is responsible for overseeing and administering the state's court system within its geographic area. This includes handling civil and criminal cases, family law matters, probate issues, and more. The circuit is presided over by a circuit court judge, and it also includes county courts.

BlackCat/ALPHV posted First Judicial Circuit of Florida to its data leak site on October 10th, threatening to publish 2TB of stolen data if the organization fails to pay an unspecified ransom.

Overview of BlackCat/ALPHV Ransomware

First observed in late 2021, BlackCat/ALPHV is a RaaS that employs a well-developed RaaS platform that encrypts by way of an AES algorithm. The code is highly customizable and includes JSON configurations for affiliate customization. BlackCat/ALPHV has the ability to disable security tools and evade analysis and is probably the most advanced ransomware family at present capable of employing different encryption routines, advanced self-propagation, and hinders hypervisors to for obfuscations and anti-analysis.

BlackCat/ALPHV can impact systems running Windows, VMWare ESXi and Linux (including Debian, ReadyNAS, Ubuntu, and Synology distributions). BlackCat/ALPHV became one of the more active RaaS platforms over the course of 2022, and attack volumes in Q1 2023 continued to increase although it was overtaken by Cl0p in number of attacks in Q1 2023. BlackCat/ALPHV typically demands ransoms in the $400,000 to $3 million range but has exceeded $5 million.

BlackCat/ALPHV is the first ransomware group using Rust, a secure programming language that offers exceptional performance for concurrent processing. The ransomware deletes all Volume Shadow Copies using the vssadmin.exe utility and wmic to thwart rollback attempts and attains privilege escalation by leveraging the CMSTPLUA COM interface and bypasses User Account Control (UAC). It encrypts files with the ChaCha20 or the AES algorithm. BlackCat/ALPHV developers opted for faster over stronger encryption by employing several modes of intermittent encryption and employs a tool called Exmatter for data exfiltration.

Targeting and Impact

BlackCat/ALPHV has a wide variability in targeting, but most often focuses on the healthcare, pharmaceutical, financial, manufacturing, legal and professional services industries. The group achieved a new low by publishing private, compromising clinical photographs of breast cancer patients exfiltrated during an attack. BlackCat/ALPHV also exfiltrates victim data prior to the execution of the ransomware – including from cloud-based deployments - to be leveraged in double extortion schemes to compel payment of the ransom demand. They have one of the more generous RaaS offerings, offering as much as 80-90% cut to affiliates. BlackCat/ALPHV is also noted for putting their leaks website on the public web instead of dark web.