![Canon openly confirms August data breach, ransomware attack as well Canon openly confirms August data breach, ransomware attack as well](https://varindia.com/storage/news/uploads/2018/02/5fc105501e576.jpg)
Canon has openly confirmed that the ransomware caused the cyberattack in early August and that the hackers stole data from company servers.
The report on attack after tracking a suspicious outage on the cloud photo and video storage service that caused the users to lose files was first reported by the BleepingComputer. On August 5, Canon USA sent out a company-wide notification informing employees of extensive system issues that made multiple applications - Teams and email among them, unavailable.
BleepingComputer obtained a partial screenshot of the ransom note that showed the outage had been caused by Maze ransomware, a group that typically steals data from compromised networks to pressure victims into paying up.
Canon started to investigate the incident and found evidence of unauthorized activity on its network between July 20 and August 6.
The threat actor had accessed its file servers that also hosted "information about current and former employees from 2005 to 2020 and their beneficiaries and dependents."
In a recent public announcement, Canon says that the data accessed by the attacker included employees' names, Social Security number, date of birth, the number for the driver's license number or government-issued ID, the bank account number for direct deposits from Canon, and their electronic signature.
Shortly after the attack, Maze ransomware told BleepingComputer that they had stolen from Canon 10 terabytes of data and private databases before detonating the file-encrypting malware on August 5.
Surprisingly, the image. canon issue and the general Canon USA outage caused by the attack were unrelated. Maze confirmed that their actions did not extend to the storage service.
While it took three months to confirm the ransomware attack publicly, Canon admitted the nature of the security incident to its employees in an internal security notice on August 6.
The Maze cybercriminal group, one of the big-league players in the ransomware business on November 1, the gang shut down its operations that had started about a year and a half earlier, in May 2019.
They are responsible for the current double-extortion trend embraced by most ransomware operators today where they steal data before encrypting it and threaten to leak the files unless the victim pays the ransom.
Among their victims are important companies Allied Universal, Southwire, City of Pensacola, Canon, LG Electronics, and Xerox.
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