ALPHV/BlackCat group claims major ransomware attack on Georgia's Forsyth County

The notorious AlphV/BlackCat ransomware group has claimed responsibility for a major ransomware attack on Forsyth County, Georgia, and stealing 350 gigabytes of data from the county’s systems.

Earlier this year, officials at Forsyth County acknowledged that the county suffered a ransomware attack but did not share much details about the same. Russell Brown, director of the county’s Department of Communications, told Recorded Future News that the county “detected and contained” a ransomware attack on its internal network.

“As soon as we learned of the cyber security incident, we began working to investigate, determine the effects of the incident and implement necessary efforts to protect the privacy and security of County residents and stakeholders,” Brown said.

“As we’ve continued to actively monitor this situation, we recently learned that an unauthorised party released some County information acquired from our network. We take this very seriously and are conducting a thorough analysis to determine what and whose information is potentially involved,” he added.

Brown added that all essential services of the county remained operational and that it was working with law enforcement authorities, experts from cyber security firms, and data forensics consultants to investigate the incident further.

In a data breach notification sent to affected individuals, the county said that sensitive personal information including first and last names, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers were compromised in the incident.

Earlier this week, the infamous AlphV/ BlackCat ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the cyber attack on Forsyth County and listed it as a victim on its data leak site.

As per a post shared by FalconFeedsio on X, formerly Twitter, the ransomware group claims to be in possession of around 350GB of data stolen from the county. 

 

According to the ransomware group, the data contains sensitive personal information and other details including “Internal Company Data (Employees and citizens personal data, CV’s, DL’s, ID’s, SSN’s, Financial reports, Accounting data, Loans data, FBI documents, Insurance, Agreements” and more.

The BlackCat group is yet to state what it intends to do with the data or whether it plans to demand ransom from Forsyth County. So far, neither the county nor the group has shared details about a ransom demand, but the county has urged citizens to remain vigilant and keep an eye out for any suspicious activity in their financial accounts. If anything suspicious is identified, it needs to be reported to relevant law enforcement authorities immediately.