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The RansomHouse hacking group has listed the Victorian Chemical Company as a victim on its darknet leak site.
Hackers are claiming to have breached Coolaroo-based Vicchem, a manufacturer of industrial and agricultural chemicals.
RansomHouse listed the firm, also known as the Victorian Chemical Company, on its darknet leak site on 23 October, claiming to have stolen an undisclosed amount of data.
The hackers have not listed a ransom demand or a deadline, but have threatened to publish the stolen data shortly.
“Dear management of Victorian Chemical. We were waiting for you for quite some time, but it seems that your IT department decided to conceal the incident that took place in your company,” RansomHouse said in its leak post.
“We strongly recommend you to contact us to prevent your confidential data, projects documents from being leaked.”
The hackers also posted several hundred documents in an evidence pack, which includes several employee passport scans, invoices, banking documents, budget reports, and expense and payroll data.
Vicchem did not respond to Cyber Daily’s request for comment.
RansomHouse is one of the oldest groups still in operation today, having been first observed in mid-2021. Since then, it has claimed 150 victims, averaging a steady pace of one attack roughly every 50 days.
According to its ransom note, RansomHouse uses double extortion techniques to pressure its victims, both stealing data and encrypting it in place on a victim’s network.
“The security of your IT perimeter has been compromised (it’s not perfect at all),” RansomHouse’s ransom note typically reads.
“We encrypted your workstations and servers to make the fact of the intrusion visible and to prevent you from hiding critical data leaks.”
“We spent a lot of time researching and finding out the most important directories of your business, your weak points.
“We have already downloaded a huge amount of critical data and analysed it. Now its fate is up to you, it will either be deleted or sold, or shared with the media.”
Vicchem has the dubious distinction of appearing to be RansomHouse’s first Australian victim. Some of its more notable victims include German brewer Oettinger, the government of Colombia, and AMD.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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