Organizations around the country have received bomb threats in their inboxes. These email campaigns demanded a large sum of money in bitcoin for exchange of not blowing major venues, like schools, organizations, media outlets, and government buildings. Major cities like New York City, Washington D.C, and Detroit received these threatening emails Thursday.
Emails stated:
My man carried a bomb (Hexogen) into the building where your company is located. It is constructed under my direction. It can be hidden anywhere because of its small size, it is not able to damage the supporting building structure, but in the case of its detonation you will get many victims………I can withdraw my mercenary if you pay. You pay me 20.000 $ in Bitcoin and the bomb will not explode, but don’t try to cheat
The extortion emails demanding $20K in bitcoin threatened the ransom be paid by the end of the day. These emails had people scrambling, disrupted businesses, and has police on alert. Schools and offices across the country had to be evacuated. No bomb has been found and the threatening emails have been said to be a hoax.
The New York Police Department in a tweet said:
At this time, it appears that these threats are meant to cause disruption and/or obtain money. We’ll respond to each call regarding these emails to conduct a search but we wanted to share this information, so the credibility of these threats can be assessed as likely NOT CREDIBLE.
These emails are an attempt into causing chaos, and panic among people. The threats were sent out in bulk, automated batches to random email addresses, most likely found online from various sources like websites or email marketers.
The bomb-threat is a new bitcoin extortion scam that has been seen recently in Europe. Email sextortion scams have been threatening people to pay in bitcoin for exchange in not publishing embarrassing videos online.
If your organization has been hit with a ransomware contact LIFARS immediately.
