Paris (AFP)

A group of hackers threatened on Monday to publish certain documents that it claims to have stolen from the construction giant Bouygues Construction during a ransomware cyber attack that occurred on Thursday.

On a free access site, the group, known as Maze, published a page on Sunday entitled "Bouygues Construction" and containing a list of the company's computers believed to have been hacked and whose data is potentially blocked. According to the group, these 237 files represent more than 700 terabytes of data.

The construction subsidiary of the giant Bouygues admitted Friday to be the target since the day before a ransomware-type attack which caused the shutdown of its entire computer system.

Damien Bancal, head of intelligence for the Canadian cybersecurity company 8brains, had reported to AFP that he had contacted the pirates and learned that they were asking for "ten million dollars" not to disseminate the stolen documents.

This page "is proof that they are the ones who attacked. It’s clearly a claim. If they don’t pay, they will drop documents that they may have stolen on a drop-by-drop basis. other companies, "he told AFP.

A compressed and password protected file was added to the page on Monday.

Maze was discovered in May 2019.

According to the National Information Systems Security Agency (Anssi, IT security guard), the group (and the software of the same name, also rented to other hackers) is mainly known to be associated with disclosures documents stolen from businesses on the Internet.

In December, he announced in particular that he had stolen data from the American cable company Southwire. The latter refusing to pay the $ 6 million ransom, the hackers published in January all the stolen data, still available on their site.

The American city of Pensacola or the security company Allied Universal were also victims of the same software at the end of the year.

"These large amounts combined with the risk of disclosure of internal data make it the ransomware with the greatest potential impact on businesses and institutions," noted Anssi in a recent report.

Interviewed by AFP, neither Anssi nor Bouygues Construction wished to confirm or comment on these elements.

A judicial investigation was opened for "organized band extortion", "access to and maintenance in an automated data processing system" and "obstructing the operation of an automated data processing system", we learned on Friday at the Paris prosecutor's office.

© 2020 AFP