Ransomware attacks continue to be the go-to choice for threat actors looking to make some easy money in 2021.
The sheer number and range of victims is astonishing. Which is why it should come as no surprise that an organization with more than $1.8 billion in capital under management is the latest victim of a ransomware attack.
Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in IT, healthcare, and cleantech, reported a data breach to the Office of the Maine Attorney General this week.
The company says its internal servers were encrypted with a ransomware attack.
Advanced Technology Venture ransomware attack
In the breach notification, ATV states it learned of the incident from its third-party IT provider, who detected "anomalous activity" on two identical ATV servers.
It wasn't until two weeks later, on July 26th, that evidence was discovered suggesting there was both unauthorized access and exfiltration of the contents of the servers.
The company has not confirmed what information was compromised, but it believes it is possible the data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers of individual investors in the venture capital firm.
ATV also listed what it is doing as part of its incident response:
"We took steps to address this incident promptly after it was discovered. We notified the FBI, launched an internal investigation and retained a forensic investigation firm to assist in the investigation of and response to this incident.
We also required all employees to change their access credentials and deployed additional endpoint protection on our corporate network to help prevent this type of incident from reoccurring in the future."
It is also providing data breach victims with complimentary credit monitoring.
For more information on the ransomware attack, you can read ATV's breach notification.
