Africa’s largest supermarket chain, Shoprite Holdings which operates almost three thousand stores across twelve countries in the continent was hit by a ransomware attack.
Shoprite has a revenue of $5.8 billion and 149,000 employees. The retailer has 2,943 stores, serving millions of customers in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, DRC, Angola, and other countries.
The company disclosed that they suffered a security incident last Friday, warning customers in Eswatini, Namibia, and Zambia, that their personal information might have been compromised due to a cyberattack.
According to the statement by the supermarket, additional security measures to protect against further data loss were implemented by amending authentication processes and fraud prevention and detection strategies to protect customer data.
They assured that access to affected areas of the network has also been locked down. The compromised data includes names and ID numbers, but no financial information or bank account numbers were involved.
Now, the ransomware gang called RansomHouse took responsibility for the attack, posting an evidence sample of 600GB of data it claims to have stolen from the retailer during the attack.
RansomHouse is a new hacker group who launched their operations in December 2021 and later set up an extortion site in which stolen data are posted.
The threat actors blame their victims for poor security practices and inadequate protection. The victims who do not meet the demands of the hackers have their stolen data sold to other cybercriminals. If the data is not sold, then the group publishes them on the Onion site for free.
The threat actors claim that they do not engage in encryption and only perform data theft and extortion.
Shoprite has warned clients regarding the possibility of stolen data being used by unauthorized parties.
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