On Wednesday 6 march at 1:30 Duvel Moortgat detected a ransomware attack on their infrastructure. The well known brewery makes beers adored by many Belgians such as Duvel, Vedet and Chouffe. After the incident was reported, they had decided to stop their operations in all Belgian sites as well as the site in Kansas City USA.

Today (07/03/2024), a day later it was revealed that the pro-Russian hacker group Stormous was behind the attack. They have presumably got a hold of 88 Gigabytes of data from the company that they plan to release on their dark web blog if the ransom doesn’t get paid in 17 days time. Currently it’s unknown to the public how much money the hackers are asking for and if Duvel is going to pay up. If we may believe Stormous, their biggest ransom payment ever received was $1,000,000, however hacker groups are notoriously known for boasting and exagerating online about how great they are. So take that number with a grain of salt…

PS: it took me quite a bit of effort to find their blog on the dark web. It would have saved me a great deal of time if news reporters would publish the .onion links in their articles but I’ve noticed that they rarely do. Even ‘based’ content creators such as Mental Outlaw – who are very open about their pro stance on free speach – redact those links. I wonder if that’s for legal or ethical reasons or both? I suspect it’s not illigal to spread .onion links, because I found them on a github repo with 3.5k stars. Nevertheless I’m also not doing it because I don’t want to get into trouble 😇.