Amazon’s Ring Denies Hackers’ Claims of Ransomware Infection

Home security vendor Ring has denied falling victim to a ransomware attack, despite hackers claiming otherwise, according to reports.

Ring makes and sells home security products that incorporate outdoor surveillance cameras, including a smart doorbell and an app that allows social sharing of the images taken.

The Amazon-owned company has seen a fair share of coverage over the years, some of it focused on lax security.

Now, a hacking group known as ALPHV claims to have infected the company’s servers with ransomware and threatens to leak the data according to Forbes. A screenshot shared by cybersecurity collective vx-underground reveals the hackers’ claims:

VICE adds some fuel to the fire, reportingthat: “One person shared a link to this article in an internal Amazon Slack channel, and wrote ‘Do not discuss anything about this. The right security teams are engaged.’”

Forbes Senior Contributor Dave Winder reached out to both Amazon and Ring for a statement, and a Ring spokesperson told him that: “We currently have no indications that Ring has experienced a ransomware event.”

ALPHV hackers are known to wield the BlackCat ransomware which they operate as a service. The group is responsible for dozens of attacks on high-profile targets, including many health networks based in the US.

BlackCat is notably the first ransomware family written in the Rust programming language, which helps it evade detection by some traditional security solutions.

In 2019, Bitdefender researchers discovered an issue in Amazon’s Ring Video Doorbell Pro IoT device that would allow an attacker physically near the device to intercept the owner’s Wi-Fi network credentials and possibly mount a larger attack against the household.