The cybercriminal group RansomHub has claimed responsibility for taking down Christie’s website a few days earlier.
Earlier this month, Christie’s website went down just ahead of the start of its sales season. At the time, the auction house cited a ‘technical fault’ and the website remained down for 10 days. In the meantime, they managed to scrape together a temporary website that allowed Christie’s to be digitally functional during its two major sales. Combined, the auction house fetched $527.3 million in sales from the two auctions; the website hitch was soon forgotten.
However, new sources have now claimed that the hacker group RansomHub, which specializes in cyber extortion, was the one behind the attack. The Twitter handle DarkWebInformer and an analyst for the New Zealand firm Emsisoft, have both claimed that RansomHub has vital data about more than 500,000 auction house clients.
RansomHub has claimed that it had informed Christie’s the same and was in negotiation talks with them when the latter ended all communication. The group said: “It is clear that if this information is posted they will incur heavy fines from the violation of GDPR as well as ruining their reputation with their clients and don’t care about their privacy.” GDPR is the European data protection standard which all European entities must adhere to.
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However, so far, the auction house doesn’t seem to be too worried about the attack. A spokesperson for Christie’s said that as per their own investigation, the group could not have accessed more than the names and addresses of the clients. This is in contrast to the ‘vital’ data RansomHub claims to have, like financial data.
