The British newspaper The Guardian reports on the negotiations published by the hackers on the dark web. The British postal company Royal Mail was hacked in January, largely disrupting international mail and parcel traffic from England.
Mail traffic
The attack was carried out using LockBit ransomware, which is commonly used by cybercrime gangs with ties to Russia. Those criminals asked 80 million dollars (more than 74 million euros) to lift the systems hostage. A bargain, they thought.
If the company did not want to cooperate, it could receive a huge fine from the British privacy watchdog for ‘leaking’ personal data.
But according to Royal Mail, the hackers were wrong, according to the online negotiations. The British postal service is not at all as successful as the hackers think.
An employee of the company emailed the criminals that Royal Mail “has suffered nothing but losses”. “Look, you can read it for yourself here,” said an e-mail with a link to a news article about the postal company’s dramatic annual figures.
‘This is never taken seriously’
“The amount you ask of us is never, ever taken seriously by our board,” Royal Mail also wrote. The British postal company also did not make a ‘counteroffer’, which was requested by LockBit.
It is not clear how the case ended. A Royal Mail spokesman told the British newspaper that he could not comment on the matter because of the ongoing investigation.
