Black Cat (ALPHV), the group that claims to be behind the Suffolk County computer system breach, is responsible for the ransomware attack that crippled Henry Shine’s website for more than three weeks, experts say. It is said that he suffered a loss.
Ido Cohen, founder and CEO of DarkFeed, which tracks ransomware intrusions, said Black Cat infiltrated the systems of a medical and dental supplier late last month, and on November 3 It was posted that the data would be made public. The data was not made public and the original post was deleted, suggesting Henry Schein may be negotiating with Black Cat, Cohen said in an email.
Experts say the messages from Black Cat were posted on the dark web, a private part of the internet that can prompt criminal activity.
Anne-Marie Gothard, a spokeswoman for Henry Schein, did not directly respond to Newsday’s questions. The company previously said it had notified law enforcement and was relying on cybersecurity and forensic IT experts.
On Oct. 14, Henry Schein, Long Island’s largest publicly traded company, said a “cybersecurity incident” affected some of its manufacturing and distribution operations, but not the practice management software used by its customers. The company announced in a news release that it has determined that there was no such thing. release.
The Melville-based company’s website had been down for several days since the attack and had not returned to normal as of Wednesday afternoon. The bright blue notice instructed customers to contact their distributor or “telesales” phone number to order the product.
“When a system is hacked, it often destroys the system as well,” Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures, a Northport-based cybersecurity market researcher and publisher, said in an email. Ta. “The longer a system is down, the more damage is done. The fact that this amount of time has passed indicates the severity of the break-in and theft.”
Michael Nizich, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation at New York Institute of Technology, said BlackCat typically accesses computer systems through messages, emails, and texts that phish users.
Once a group is infiltrated, they can exploit loopholes to gain access to other parts of the system. In Suffolk County, for example, the group initially appeared to gain access to the county clerk’s office and eventually moved to the sheriff’s department, he said.
Nizich said Black Cat typically takes data (in Henry Schein’s case, trade publications say it’s payroll information and investor information) and encrypts the original data. In return, the group is offering to restore access to the targeted organization’s data. Still, he said, even if a deal is struck, companies may not be confident that BlackCat will not publish, sell or misuse the data it collects in the future.
Henry Schein will “discuss the impact of business interruption and associated recovery costs” due to the cybersecurity attack during the company’s Nov. 13 earnings call, according to a news release. Data breaches cost organizations an average of $4.45 million, according to a 2023 report from IBM that surveyed more than 550 groups affected by data breaches. The report found that it took companies an average of 73 days to stop a breach.