Yellow Pages Canada Confirms Cyber Attack Following Data Leak by Black Basta

Yellow Pages (YP) has confirmed a cyberattack that resulted in the theft of personal data. While some of the directory’s information is public, the stolen data has the potential to be used maliciously. The Black Basta ransomware group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and information about the breach was found on the group’s data leak website by analyst Dominic Alvieri.

As per the cyberattack that resulted in the theft of personal data, including ID documents showing dates of birth and addresses, tax documents with Social Insurance Numbers, sales and purchase agreements, budget and debt forecasts for December 2022, and more.

Yellow Pages’ Senior Vice President CFO immediately launched an investigation with the help of external cybersecurity experts to contain the threat and secure the system. The investigation found that the threat actors accessed personal information from servers that impacted both employee and customer data.

The affected parties were notified, along with appropriate authorities. Almost all Yellow Pages services have been restored, according to the latest report. The ransomware group claimed responsibility for the breach but has not made any demands beyond publishing the stolen data on their website.

The Black Basta ransomware group has been increasingly active, with its most recent victim being Capita, which was attacked just last month. At first, the outsourcing company thought the attack was an IT issue, but it was eventually identified as a cyberattack.

Capita reports that it detected the threat early enough that only approximately 4% of its server estate was breached. However, the cyberattack caused an outage that affected its access to Microsoft Office 365 applications. The outage has since been restored by Capita’s technical partners.

Black Basta ransomware group has become increasingly active over the past year, often posting several high-profile victims at once on its data leak website. Cybersecurity analysts have speculated that Black Basta may be a rebrand of the Conti ransomware gang based on its negotiation tactics.