There's a new group extorting ransomware victims — and it's not the ransomware gang

My honest take

I'd treat any unsolicited email offering to fix a breach you're already dealing with as hostile until proven otherwise. Legitimate incident-response firms don't cold-email your CEO with a countdown…

How the scam actually works

The pitch arrives cold, usually by email, and it's specific enough to feel credible. Ransom Busters claims to have quietly breached the administrative panels of major ransomware-as-a-service…

Who's actually behind Ransom Busters

GuidePoint's GRIT team, led by principal consultant Justin Timothy, connected two separate victim incidents using identical forensic fingerprints: the same SoftPerfect Network Scanner build, the…

This isn't new — it's an old grift with better branding

Fake recovery scams targeting individual ransomware victims aren't a new idea; smaller operators have run "we'll negotiate your ransom down" schemes for years. What's different here is scale and…

What to do if you get one of these emails