The Medusa Ransomware Attack on The Sindbad Club

The Medusa ransomware gang has attacked The Sinbad Club. The Sindbad Club is a well-known and established resort located in Egypt. The resort, situated in a picturesque setting, offers a range of amenities and activities for leisure and entertainment, making it a popular choice for both local and international visitors. Medusa posted The Sindbad Club to its data leak site on July 25th, threatening to leak a large amount of stolen information if the organization fails to pay a $1,000,000 ransom by August 4th.

Medusa is a RaaS that debuted in the summer of 2021 and has evolved into one of the more active RaaS platforms in late 2022. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software and prevent recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting shadow copies.

Increased Activity and Ransom Demands

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

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

Target Industries and Extortion Tactics

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