A hacking group claims it has documents related to the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and has threatened to release them.
The group at one point set a deadline of Saturday to be paid a ransom, according to Business Insider.
On Saturday, however, the group said it must be paid by Thursday at 8:49 a.m. Eastern time.
As of Thursday morning, there had been no release of documents and no information made public that any ransom was paid.
It was not revealed how much money the group, which said it had the files it stole beyond the reach of law enforcement, was demanding.
The group is led by a hacker with the fake name LockBitSupp. It had been the subject of a Feb. 20 raid by the FBI and Britain’s National Crime Agency.
On that day, officials claimed 34 servers were taken down.
The same day, the Department of Justice indicted two Russians it said were involved in hacking.
The indictment claimed that since 2000, the two suspects were involved in more than 2,000 cases involving more than $120 million in ransomware payments.
Will hackers release these files?
“For years, LockBit associates have deployed these kinds of attacks again and again across the United States and around the world. Today, U.S. and U.K. law enforcement are taking away the keys to their criminal operation,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release posted on the department’s website.
“And we are going a step further — we have also obtained keys from the seized LockBit infrastructure to help victims decrypt their captured systems and regain access to their data. LockBit is not the first ransomware variant the Justice Department and its international partners have dismantled. It will not be the last,” Garland said in the release.
The group said in a statement that it was targeted because of what it knows about the cases against Trump in Georgia.
“The FBI decided to hack now for one reason only, because they didn’t want to leak information from https://fultoncountyga.gov/ the stolen documents contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election,” the statement said.
“Personally I will vote for Trump because the situation on the border with Mexico is some kind of nightmare, Biden should retire, he is a puppet,” the statement said.
“If it wasn’t for the FBI attack, the documents would have been released the same day, because the negotiations stalled,” the statement said.
“I need to attack the .gov sector more often and more, it is after such attacks that the FBI will be forced to show me weaknesses and vulnerabilities and make me stronger,” the statement said.
According to Atlanta News First, Fulton County has a plan in place to address any leak of private information.
