Medusa Ransomware Group Targets Accipiter Capital Management

Medusa ransomware group has attacked Accipiter Capital Management. The attack involves critical data, including certificates, PII documents, forms, confidential information, and financial data. A ransom demand of $300,000 has been given, with a deadline of 27 March. Accipiter Capital Management (Accipiter) is a Florida-based hedge fund manager founded by Gabriel Hoffman in 2002. The firm invests in the public equity markets of the United States with a primary focus on the healthcare industry.

Background on Medusa Ransomware

Medusa is a RaaS that made its debut in the summer of 2021 and has evolved to be one of the more active RaaS platforms. Attack volumes were inconsistent in the first half of 2023, with a resurgence of attack activity in the last half of 2023. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software as well preventing recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting VSS Shadow Copies to thwart encryption rollback.

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and has been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appears to have waned somewhat in the second quarter. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars, which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay.

Method of Attack

The Medusa RaaS operation (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or through malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments (there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.)

Targets and Tactics

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and public sector organizations too. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, but they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.