The personal information of thousands of Israeli citizens has been compromised as the result of a cyberattack on Shirbit, a leading insurance company.
The attack was disclosed in a joint announcement by the Capital Markets Authority and the Israel National Cyber Directorate, which confirmed that customer information had also been leaked online. Both organizations are currently investigating the incident.
Data compromised in the hack included identification numbers, drivers’ licenses, email and mailing addresses, and automobile registration forms. Many of the individuals compromised are thought to be Israeli civil servants, which comprise a large number of Shirbit’s policies.
A hacking group known as BlackShadow has claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter, and included images of stolen documents as proof.
“There has been a massive attack on the network infrastructure of Shirbit Company, which is in israel economic sphere [sic],” said one of the hacking group’s tweets, which also claimed to have accessed the identities of all of the company’s employees.
Twitter has since suspended BlackShadow’s account.
BlackShadow has since demanded a ransom of 50 Bitcoin, or approximately $1 million for information stolen from Shirbit’s servers, threatening to double the figure every 24 hours.
Little is known about BlackShadow, but security experts speculate that they may be operating on behalf of the Iranian government, which has threatened reprisal against Israel following the recent assassination of one of its nuclear scientists. The group is also thought to have been behind an unsuccessful cyberattack on an Israeli defense corporation earlier in 2020.
