On the weekend of August 11th, a cyberattack targeted the computer systems of the Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Emilia Centrale (Central Emilia Reclamation Consortium)
Initially, there was a slowdown in the computer systems, followed by a complete shutdown that occurred on the following Saturday, August 12th, rendering the call center and all computer-managed services inoperative.
Printers across the organization began producing sheets with the same message: “Dateci 1.1 milioni di euro o distruggeremo tutti i vostri dati” (“Give us 1,1 million euros, or we will destroy all your data”). At the time of the incident, the Director of the Consortium, Domenico Turazza, reported that a total of 50GB of data had been exfiltrated from various servers out of a total of 15,000GB of encrypted data.
In a statement, Director Turazza affirmed that they would never negotiate with cybercriminals. Today, we know that the LockBit ransomware group was responsible for the attack on August 11th.
The LockBit ransomware group claims to have targeted the servers of the Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Emilia Centrale, one of the 9 Consortia in the region that are part of the ANBI Emilia Romagna. These Consortia have already been severely affected in the recent past and are currently making further efforts to safeguard the territory and, above all, the safety of people.
The ANBI Emilia Romagna was established in July 1945 to associate and represent all the reclamation consortia operating in the regional territory for soil defense and water resource management. It is part of the national ANBI (National Association of Reclamation and Water Management Consortia), the central organization based in Rome that coordinates all the Unions established at the regional level.
On the LockBit website, a countdown is underway, with 7 days to negotiate before the group of cybercriminals publicly releases all the data exfiltrated from the Consortium’s servers.
At the moment, no further details are known about the case. SuspectFile will update the article in case of new developments.