Fortune 50 company pays record-breaking $75M ransomware demand

A Fortune 50 company paid $75 million to its cyberattackers earlier this year, greatly exceeding any other confirmed ransom payment in history. The beneficiary of the payout is an outfit called Dark Angels. And Dark Angels isn’t just effective — in some ways, the gang turns so much of what we thought we knew about ransomware on its head.

Sure, there have been other big amounts forked over in the past: In 2021, Illinois-based CNA Financial was reported to have paid a then unprecedented $40 million ransom in order to restore its systems after a ransomware attack (the company never confirmed that figure). Later that year, the meat manufacturer JBS admitted to paying $11 million to end a disruption affecting its factories. Caesars Palace last year paid $15 million to make its ransomware disruption problems go away.

But those figures pale in comparison against the $75 million in equivalent Bitcoin paid by the aforementioned large organization, which Zscaler chose to keep anonymous in its 2024 annual ransomware report, where the payout was first recorded. The dollar amount has also been corroborated by Chainalysis.

Meet the Dark Angels

Dark Angels first appeared in the wild in May 2022. Ever since, its specialty has been defeating fewer but higher-value targets than its ransomware brethren. Past victims have included multiple S&P 500 companies spread across varied industries: healthcare, government, finance, education, manufacturing, telecommunications, and more.

For example, there was its headline-grabbing attack on the megalith Johnson Controls International (JCI) last year. It breached the company’s VMware ESXi hypervisors, freezing them with Ragnar Locker and stealing a reported 27 terabytes worth of data. The ransom demand: $51 million. It’s unclear how Johnson Controls responded but, considering its $27 million-plus cleanup effort, it’s likely that the company did not cave.

$27 million would have been the second-largest ransom payment in recorded history at the time (after the reported CNA payment). But there’s evidence to suggest that this wasn’t just some outlandish negotiating tactic — that Dark Angels has good reason to think it can pull off that kind of haul.

Dark Angels Does Ransomware Differently

Forget everything you know about ransomware, and you’ll start to understand Dark Angels.

Against the grain, the group does not operate a ransomware-as-a-service business. Nor does it have its own malware strain — it prefers to borrow encryptors like Ragnar Locker and Babuk.

To read the complete article, visit Dark Reading.