REvil, the well-known Russian hacker group has recently announced the American Televangelist Kenneth Copeland as their latest victim, threatening to publicly release 1.2 terabytes of sensitive information if he turns down the demand payment of the hacking group, the amount of the ransom is unspecified.
On Wednesday, Revil issue a claiming they had successfully taken over the servers of the Texas-based international church of the 83-year-old pastor, Kenneth Copeland Ministries. The hacking group stated within their Dark Web posts that they absolutely hacked and encrypted all servers and working computers of the ministry company.
Some images that are part of the hacked data were released by the group that shows the stolen data, claims of information containing sensitive financial documents, bank statements, contacts, email exchanges and sales history.
The pastor who’s Networth has been reported and estimated between $300 million to $760 million founded the ministry in 1967 sat on President Donald Trump’s advisory board.
REvil has not specified the amount of ransom they are demanding in their public statement were removed after several days, indicating the possibility that negotiations might have been taking place. Kenneth Copeland Ministries have not issued a response to inquiries related to the cyber-attack.
What is REvil hacking group?
REvil, short for ‘Ransomware Evil’, also known as Sodinokibi, are hackers that work and recruits other hackers to help distribute ransomware for the group. REvil refers to the group and malicious software. As part of their modus, they split any ransom paid by the victim using their malware to the affiliate hackers who distributed the ransomware. All the members are known to speak the Russian language, and the group operates somewhere in Russia and Eastern Europe.
REvil’s modus is encrypting their victim company’s servers, workstations and data storage and then threatening the company that they will release or auction off the stolen data publicly which is the most common scam tactics used by ransomware groups.
These ransomware groups do not discriminate on choosing victims, whether it’s government, private company, hospital, charity and religious organization as they’ll attack anybody who they think can afford the payment of the ransom they are demanding.
Ransomeware is indeed increasingly becoming more of a problem as the sophistication of the cyber-attacks and tactics that the hacking groups deploy are becoming more innovative and more extreme.
