The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has sent out a flash alert warning private industry partners that the HelloKitty ransomware gang (aka FiveHands) has added distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to their arsenal of extortion tactics.
In a Friday notification coordinated with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI said that the ransomware group would take their victims' official websites down in DDoS attacks if they didn't comply with the ransom demands.
HelloKitty is also known for stealing sensitive documents from victims' compromised servers before encrypting them. The exfiltrated files are later used as leverage to pressure the victims into paying the ransom under the threat of leaking the stolen data online on a data leak site.
