The United Nations Growth Programme (UNDP) is investigating a cyberattack after menace actors breached its IT programs to steal human assets knowledge.
UNDP, the UN’s world improvement community, works in over 170 international locations and territories and depends on donations from UN member states and personal sector/multilateral organizations to assist eradicate poverty and struggle inequality and exclusion.
In a press release printed Tuesday, the group revealed that the attackers hacked into native IT infrastructure in UN Metropolis, Copenhagen, in late March.
“On March 27, UNDP acquired a menace intelligence notification {that a} data-extortion actor had stolen knowledge which included sure human assets and procurement info,” the UN company disclosed.
“Actions have been instantly taken to establish a possible supply and include the affected server in addition to to find out the specifics of the uncovered knowledge and who was impacted.”
UNDP is now investigating the character and scope of the incident and assessing the assault’s affect on people whose info was stolen.
It additionally alerted and is now working with these affected by the breach to allow them to defend their private info from misuse.
Claimed by 8Base
Whereas the UN company has but to hyperlink the assault to a particular menace group, the 8Base ransomware gang added a brand new UNDP entry to its darkish net knowledge leak web site on March 27.
The attackers say that the paperwork their operators managed to exfiltrate in the course of the breach include giant quantities of delicate info.
The information they quickly leaked by way of a now-expired hyperlink allegedly embrace “an enormous quantity of confidential info,” private knowledge, accounting knowledge, certificates, employment contracts, confidentiality agreements, invoices, receipts, and extra.
8Base emerged in March 2022, and their exercise spiked in June 2023 after they began attacking corporations throughout a broader vary of business verticals and switching to double extortion.
The gang launched its knowledge leak website in Could 2023, with the extortion group claiming to be “trustworthy and easy” pen testers concentrating on “corporations which have uncared for the privateness and significance of the information of their workers and prospects.”
To this point, this ransomware group has listed over 350 victims on its website, saying as much as six victims without delay on some days. 8Base makes use of a personalized model of Phobos ransomware, a malware that first surfaced in 2019 and shares many code similarities with Dharma ransomware.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) additionally disclosed a data breach in January 2021 after over 100,000 worker information containing personally identifiable info (PII) have been uncovered on-line.
UN networks in Geneva and Vienna have been additionally breached in July 2019 by way of a Sharepoint vulnerability, exposing employees information, medical health insurance, and industrial contract knowledge in what a UN official described as a “main meltdown.”
