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4 New Square Chambers was hit by a cyberattack on the 12th of June where threat actors stole data and threatened to reveal it by blackmailing the company into paying the ransom. Now, the barristers’ chambers thought of a rather peculiar solution to fight against the hackers by obtaining a private injunction from the High Court of London against the attackers who caused the ransomware cyberattack. The goal is to mitigate the spreading or publishing of the stolen information with this new court order.
Who Is 4 New Square?
4 New Square is a London-based company that consists of a set of commercial barristers chambers. The fields it covers are civil fraud, reinsurance and insurance domain, professional liability, international dispute resolution, construction and engineering, commercial and offshore dispute settlement. The advocates provide oral and written submissions, cross-evaluation, and offer legal assistance in both contentious and non-contentious situations.
What’s This Privacy Injunction About?
Well, the barristers’ chambers has been victim to a ransomware cyberattack recently. So they called on the High Court of England to take action. The privacy injunction was released and announced by Mrs. Justice Steyn and it bans threat actors from disclosing the stolen data, otherwise, they will be arrested, fined, or disposed of their assets, as the privacy injunction states. Until now, no information has been published or made public on any hacker blogs.
The Register mentioned that they find it peculiar to implement such a solution. Performing cyberattacks and data disclosure is what threat actors do, thus it is rather odd to try to stop them using an order from the civil court. Anyway, these kinds of privacy injunctions are not supposed to have an effect upon cybercriminals that conduct their operations, in our case, allegedly from countries like Russia, Iran, or North Korea that do not have to comply with the English court rules.
The New Square injunction concedes that the perpetrators may be overseas, but states that the terms of the order apply to anyone ‘able to prevent acts or omissions outside the jurisdiction of this court which constitutes or assist in a breach of the terms of this order’.
However, the authors of the ransomware cyberattack targeting 4 New Square who blackmail the company are not known yet.
What Is a Ransomware Cyberattack?
A ransomware cyberattack is a type of malicious software that has the ability to encrypt all the information found on a personal computer. Hackers use this method to make victims pay the ransom, in other words, make them pay in order to get the decryption key.
Ransomware Not Without a Precedent Nowadays
The ransomware cyberattack is not something that lacks popularity nowadays, as these kinds of attacks have been emerging in a row recently. Examples in this sense show that hackers are in control of what they do and it’s hard to make them stop, so a civil court order would most probably be inefficient. Only Clop ransomware group members have been arrested until now with the help of Ukraine Cyber Police, US Law Enforcement, Cyber Bureau of Korean National Police Agency, Spanish Civil Guard, Binance, and Swiss Federal Office of Police.
Revil Ransomware for example makes headlines day by day. It affected Nuclear contractor Sol Oriens where research and development documentation belonging to the company was leaked on the dark web market. No to mention the ransomware cyberattack that targeted Colonial Pipeline and made the company pay $5m to restore their pipeline pumping oil and digital systems. The threat actors behind these two are still free.
Hi! My name is Andra and I am a passionate writer interested in a variety of topics. I am curious about the cybersecurity world and what I want to achieve through what I write is to keep you curious too!
