Despite Pine Labs maintaining that its systems were secure, a preliminary investigation revealed that the attack affected financial institutions across India. Pine Labs, an Indian merchant company that provides financing and last-mile retail transaction technology, is the latest victim of a ransomware attack, an investigation by Cyble Research Lab has revealed. Pine Labs was attacked by a ransomware group called BlackMatter which has emerged as a new hacking group that extorts huge sums of money. According to the report, 5,00,000 unique records including sensitive information such as phone, name, and email ids were accessed. Cyble Research Lab is a global threat intelligence Software as a Service (SaaS) provider that helps enterprises protect themselves from cybercrimes and exposure on the dark web. According to cybersecurity firm SophosLab, India tops the list of countries most affected by ransomware attacks. CheckPoint’s report has also indicated that ransomware attacks in India rose by 93 percent in the first six months of 2021. Holding digital information hostage is a popular way for ransomware hackers to get rich since companies are willing to pay huge sums of money to retrieve their data. India doesn't have a data protection bill yet and there is no recourse for firms or their customers once they are targetted. Speaking to Inc42 about the data breach, Sanjeev Kumar, the chief technology officer of Pine Labs said, “We can confidently state that our systems continue to be fully secure and our production systems continue to operate as usual and all customer data is safe.” He…
