Azimut Group, an Italian asset management firm that oversees over $87.2 billion in assets, declared in a public statement that it will "not comply by any means" with a ransomware demand from the notorious hacking organisation BlackCat.
Israeli hacking monitoring start-up DarkFeed said the same ransomware group in September stole large amounts of data from state-owned Italian energy services firm GSE. It revealed on its website that Azimut was one of BlackCat's 477 victims on July 21. Azimut did not respond immediately.
BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, first appeared in late 2021 and is notorious for carrying out sophisticated assaults on a number of firms in the United States and Europe.
"The attack did not affect data or information that might allow access to the personal position of clients and financial advisors or the execution of unauthorised transactions," Azimut said in a press release.
Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity firm based in California, also confirmed that BlackCat was behind the hack.
According to the firm, Azimut was one of 23 enterprises targeted in July alone. The hackers claimed to have taken more than 500GB (Gigabytes) of private data from Azimut.
Security experts at Unit 42 claimed that BlackCat is the second most active multi-extortion ransomware organisation behind LockBit, based on leak site tracking.
"We've seen a wide range of industries [as targets], including law firms, engineering firms, health care systems, manufacturing, and more," the researchers stated.
Azimut, which handles 85 billion euros in assets, nearly half of which are in Italy, claimed it discovered an unauthorised entry to its IT systems as part of its usual monitoring activity.
It had notified the appropriate authorities and had implemented an internal safety procedure that "successfully limited the impact of the criminal action," the company added.