LockBit Ransomware Gang Attacks Municipality of Cangas

The LockBit ransomware gang has attacked the Municipality of Cangas. The Municipality of Cangas is a seaside resort in southwestern Galicia, Spain. LockBit published all stolen information, which includes documents, personal, finance, accounting, and police data, on June 16th.

Background of LockBit

LockBit has been active since 2019 and is enabled with security tool evasion capabilities and an extremely fast encryption speed. LockBit is noted for using a triple extortion model where the victim may also be asked to purchase their sensitive information in addition to paying the ransom demand for decrypting systems. The group continues to improve its attack platform and introduced LockBit in June of 2022, which bore some similarities to the BlackMatter ransomware. The latest version incorporates advanced anti-analysis features and is a threat to both Windows and Linux systems.

Technical Details

LockBit employs a Base64-encoded hash and an RSA public key in its configuration and hashes it with MD5. LockBit also created its own bug bounty program.

Affiliate Program and Extortion Techniques

LockBit is a very well-run affiliate program and has a great reputation amongst the affiliate (attacker) community for the maturity of the platform as well as for offering high payouts of as much as 75% of the attack proceeds. LockBit is known to employ multiple extortion techniques, including data exfiltration, to compel payment.