Asahi Group Holdings has confirmed that a ransomware attack earlier this year resulted in the leakage of personal data belonging to approximately 2 million customers and employees. The Qilin ransomware group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Business Impact
This massive breach highlights the “long tail” of ransomware incidents. Beyond operational downtime, the exfiltration of employee and customer PII leads to long-term reputational damage, regulatory fines, and potential class-action lawsuits.
Why It Happened
Qilin ransomware affiliates target large enterprises using double-extortion tactics. They likely gained initial access via compromised credentials or unpatched VPNs, exfiltrating data before encrypting systems.
Recommended Executive Action
Assume that “encrypt-only” attacks are rare; data theft is the norm. focus heavily on Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and egress filtering to detect large data transfers before encryption occurs.
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