A ransomware gang has donated a part of the ransom demands it extorted from victims to charity organizations.
Current recipients include Children International, a non-profit for sponsoring children in extreme poverty, and The Water Project, a non-profit aiming to provide access to clean and reliable water across sub-Saharan Africa.
Each organization received 0.88 bitcoin (~$10,000) last week, according to transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain [1, 2].
The sender was a ransomware group going by the name of Darkside.
Active since August 2020, the Darkside group is a classic “big game hunter,” meaning it specifically goes after large corporate networks, encrypts their data, and asks huge ransom demands in the realm of millions of US dollars.
If victims don’t pay, the Darkside group leaks their data online, on a portal they are operating on the dark web.
“As we said in the first press release – we are targeting only large profitable corporations,” the Darkside group wrote in a page on their dark web portal, published on Monday.
To read more of this article by Catalin Cimpanu, click here.