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Lessons from the BlackBasta Ransomware Attack on Capita

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Introduction When a company that manages data for millions of UK citizens falls victim to ransomware, the whole industry should pay attention to it. On 15 October 2025, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published a detailed 136 page report about the Capita breach.  The aim of this blog is to extract actionable cybersecurity lessons from the ICO’s findings as well as open source reports surrounding the breach from a cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analyst’s perspective to help SOC and CERT teams, and CISOs understand what happened and how to avoid the mistakes made by others. BLUF Incident Impact Summary: Capita was attacked by BlackBasta ransomware in March 2023 Over six million individual’s records were exfiltrated from Capita’s systems A £14 million fine was issued to Capita by the ICO Capita said in May 2023, the incident cost up to £20 million to recover Important context about Capita The Capita Group is a business process outsourcing (BPO) and professional servic...

Ransomware Tool Matrix Update: Community Reports

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  Introduction The Ransomware Tool Matrix continues to be a useful passion project that I am happy to continue maintaining. One piece of common feedback I've received for the Ransomware Tool Matrix was that individuals would like to contribute their observations to it, but do not have public links they can cite (such as a formal blog post on a company website). Therefore, I came up with a plan to make a reporting template to help with this. What are Community Reports? Individuals can now share what tools they have seen various ransomware groups, affiliates, or initial access brokers (IABs) use via the new Community Report Template. The level of detail provided is the contributor's choice. The more verifiable information shared, the increased level of reliability and credibility. You can view the current list of Community Reports on GitHub  here . Why the need for Community Reports? Most of the sources of CTI about ransomware TTPs comes from open source reports by organisation...

Ransomware Tool Matrix Project Updates: May 2025

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Introduction This blog is a summary and analysis of recent additions to the Ransomware Tool Matrix (RTM) as well as the Ransomware Vulnerability Matrix (RVM) .  Feedback from the infosec community about these projects has been overwhelmingly positive and many researchers have contacted me to tell me how helpful they have found these to be.  It makes me happy to hear how doing something in my spare time can help stop ransomware attacks and cybercriminals from exploiting our society’s systems. And it is for that reason, I shall continue to maintain these projects as long as ransomware is still around.  For anyone new to these projects, please read the descriptions on GitHub or feel free to watch my talk explaining the project at BSides London . Background on the current ransomware ecosystem as of May 2025 Following the impact of Operation Cronos against LockBit and the exit scam by ALPHV/BlackCat, the ransomware ecosystem has been even more unstable than usual.  The e...