The crisis after the cyber attack on Scandinavian Airlines worsened today, with Anonymous Sudan increasing the ransom demand from $3,500 to $175,000.
Scandinavian Airlines is the flag carrier of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. According to the threat intelligence service FalconFeeds, it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
“We will continue attacking your services and keep it down for days upon days and this won’t cost us anything big, but it’ll cost you millions,” said a Telegram post by Anonymous Sudan.
“Since you were late and greedy in paying the last ransom, we multiplied the value of the ransom by 50.”
The cyber attack on Scandinavian Airlines has rendered the company and booking websites inactive. They remained inaccessible at the time of publishing this report.
Cyber attack on Scandinavian Airlines
The Cyber Express emailed the carriers to confirm the cyber attack on Scandinavian Airlines. We will update this report after receiving their response.
Cyber attack on Scandinavian Airlines: Anonymous Sudan’s claims
Then initial threat came early on 24 May, with a ransom demand of $3,500.
“The Anonymous Sudanese group attacked the website of the Scandinavian airline SAS for several hours and is now demanding a ransom of $3,500 or it will attack again in about an hour,” the group shortly posted on Telegram.
Anonymous Sudan wrote that they attempted to attack the Scandinavian Airlines previously, which the company, the group claimed, “tried to repel”. However, this attack was the “second strike” to prove that they can still target them.
The group threatened to keep holding the Scandinavian Airlines app and website inaccessible until a ransom was paid.
“Otherwise we will continue the attack and will leak something you will not like,” the hackers wrote.
“We know that you are watching this post, you have an hour to contact us via this bot: If you want us to tell you the method to prevent the attack, talk in the bot and we will negotiate.”
Screenshot of Anonymous Sudan’s website (Photo: FalconFeedsio)The Anonymous Sudan group demanded the officials of the Scandinavian Airlines to speak with them via a bot on the group’s website.
At first, they demanded a $3,500 ransom payment to stop the ongoing SAS app cyber attack, which left the website inaccessible.
They also gave a deadline of one hour from the time of writing for the Scandinavian Airlines to contact the group and cough up the ransom now increased to $175,000.
“You want to act lost and not aware of what’s happening for just 3500 dollars you risked everything in your company,” the previous threat read.
The group threatened to further their cyber attack in the future as they wrote, “We hope you will enjoy it when we attack you with all our power.”
Apparently the threat was dismissed and the ransom was not paid, prompting Anonymous Sudan to intensify the threat, saying that they multiplied the value of the ransom by 50 and threatened to keep the website down for days.
They hacker group’s Telegram message further stated that they will keep increasing the value of ransom if the payment is delayed.
Meanwhile customers are complaining about delayed flights all over social media will some even threatening to raise legal procedures against the airlines. A user wrote, “This is unacceptable, just pay anonymous sudan the ransom.”
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