9-11 Insurance Hack Breaks New Ground In Cyber-Extortion

By successfully breaching a law firm retained by global insurer Hiscox, a group known as The Dark Overlord has obtained a trove of litigation documents related to the 9-11 attack. “The news gives insight into how hacking groups may be evolving in their extortion efforts; opting to drip out stolen material bit by bit, while generating public interest through the media and their own announcements, all to exert pressure on the ransom victim,” writes Joseph Cox in Motherboard, which has reported extensively on the incident. Among other possibly ground-breaking ploys, The Dark Overlord has set up its own crowdfunding project. “Continue to keep the bitcoins flowing,” they write, “and we’ll continue to keep the truth flowing.” The incident apparently began – or at least it was first made public – in April of last year by way of a statement from the insurance company itself: “Hiscox recently learned of an information security incident affecting a specialist law firm in the US that provided advice to Hiscox or its policyholders on some of its US commercial liability insurance claims,” it said. “The incident involved illegal access to information stored on the law firm’s server, which may have included information relating to up to 1,500 of Hiscox’s US-based commercial insurance policyholders.” (The statement also said that the breached law firm’s computer systems aren’t connected to those of Hixcox, and thus its systems weren’t compromised.) There is no indication that perpetrators in this case are 9-11 conspiracy buffs, but Motherboard reports that the breached information – which includes legal correspondence between law firms and communications from government agencies – has been of special interest to some groups that are.