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Who's Profiting From The WannaCry Ransoms? (cnn.com)
CNN reports:
For months, the ransom money from the massive WannaCry cyberattack sat untouched in online accounts. Now, someone has moved it. More than $140,000 worth of digital currency bitcoin has been drained from three accounts linked to the ransomware virus that hit hundreds of thousands of computers around the world in May.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian law firm wants NotPetya victims to join a collective lawsuit against Intellect-Service LLC, the company behind the M.E.Doc accounting software, said to be the point of origin of the NotPetya ransomware outbreak. An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The NotPetya ransomware spread via a trojanized M.E.Doc update, according to Microsoft, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Cisco, ESET, and Ukrainian Cyber Police. A subsequent investigation revealed that Intellect-Service had grossly mismanaged the hacked servers, which were left without updates since 2013 and were backdoored on three different occasions... The Juscutum Attorneys Association says that on Tuesday, Ukrainian Cyber Police confirmed that M.E.Doc servers were backdoor on three different occasions in an official document. The company is now using this document as the primary driving force behind its legal action.
The law firm says victims must pay all of the court fees -- and give them 30% of any awarded damages.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian law firm wants NotPetya victims to join a collective lawsuit against Intellect-Service LLC, the company behind the M.E.Doc accounting software, said to be the point of origin of the NotPetya ransomware outbreak. An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The NotPetya ransomware spread via a trojanized M.E.Doc update, according to Microsoft, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Cisco, ESET, and Ukrainian Cyber Police. A subsequent investigation revealed that Intellect-Service had grossly mismanaged the hacked servers, which were left without updates since 2013 and were backdoored on three different occasions... The Juscutum Attorneys Association says that on Tuesday, Ukrainian Cyber Police confirmed that M.E.Doc servers were backdoor on three different occasions in an official document. The company is now using this document as the primary driving force behind its legal action.
The law firm says victims must pay all of the court fees -- and give them 30% of any awarded damages.
Trust me, this is the kind of law firm that will take a lot more than 30%.
And the victims get a 10% discount on future purchases (or services) from the company that bilked them in the first place.
Class action suits were a great idea when they were used for social benefit like going after polluters who were untouchable by individual victims, but these days they seem to be mostly moneymakers for the legal firm that handles the lawsuit premised on some minor impropriety (or none sometimes) of the defendant entity.
It looks like this Ukrainian legal group just found a more profitable way to skin their clients.