The Pendragon Group, which has more than 200 car dealerships in the UK, has been attacked by the LockBit group, which has demanded $60 million to decrypt files on the company's systems and stop them from being leaked to the dark web. Pendragon owns CarStore, Evans Halshaw and Stratstone, which sell cars for every budget, from Jaguar, Porsche, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Land Rover or Aston Martin to Renault, Ford, Hyundai, Nissan, Peugeot, Vauxhall, Citroen , DS, Dacia and DAF.
Initially, the company did not provide many technical details about what happened, limiting itself to a brief message that IT specialists had identified suspicious activity on Pendragon networks, but the incident did not affect the performance of the car dealer in any way.
However, in an interview with The Times on Friday, Kim Costello, chief marketing officer of the company, said that the cyber attack occurred about a month ago and the LockBit group is behind it. According to Costello, representatives of the company talked to the hackers and even received part of the stolen files as evidence of hacking, but did not enter into negotiations.
The hackers asked for tens of millions of dollars before the deadline, while threatening to leak data, Costello added. According to The Times, LockBit has requested a $60 million ransom.
A spokesperson for the company said Pendragon stands firm on its decision not to pay the hackers. Upon discovering the attack, the company reported the incident to UK law enforcement and the country's data protection authority.
It is worth noting that the company's IT team managed to respond very quickly to the attack, which is why the attackers managed to steal only 5% of the entire Pendragon database.
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