The Maze ransomware gang appears to be behind a recent cyberattack against Canon .
According to information, the multinational photography equipment company fell victim to a ransomware cyberattack by the Maze gang against its email and storage services , as well as its American website, on July 30
The ransomware gang threatened Canon that it would leak photos and data if a ransom in cryptocurrency was not paid.
The image.canon website was down for six days, and was restored on August 4. Canon, in a statement made that day about the ransomware attack, said that no image data or thumbnails of photos stored on the cloud service were leaked .
However, the severity of the cyberattack was confirmed on August 5 by BleepingComputer, with Maze claiming to have managed to steal around 10TB of photos, files and other data. The publication cited a notification sent by Canon's IT department over its corporate network , which confirmed that "extensive system issues" had affected multiple applications.
Paradoxically, the ransomware gang said that its attack is not responsible for the six-day outage of Canon's website.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Brett Callow, a risk analyst at malware lab Emsisoft, confirmed that the notorious Maze ransomware gang is behind the cyberattacks against the Japanese multinational:
«It's impossible to say for sure whether the files they recovered contain customer photos and videos stored on Canon's storage. Canon says some photos and videos were lost, so it seems likely that the ransomware gang had access to that area of the network..»
Callow also noted that ransomware is primarily used against smaller businesses, but the larger ones are the ones that fall victim with increasing frequency.
Emsisoft experts believe that the probability of data theft in a ransomware attack is now greater than 10%, citing a recent study published by the lab.
