Berlin Refuses to Pay Hackers Who Stole Data From the City’s State Network

August 28, 2026 1 Min Read 0

Threat Intelligence Brief

Curated summary with source attribution

Source: thehackernews.com

Threat Risk: High
Victim: Berlin State Government
Incident: Data breach and extortion attempt targeting the Berlin state administrative network.
Impact: Exfiltration of 5.79 TB of data and personal information of over 12,000 individuals.
Attacker: Rhysida
Analysis: The Rhysida ransomware group successfully exfiltrated nearly 6 terabytes of data from Berlin’s state government, including sensitive geospatial and personal records. The attackers likely leveraged compromised VPN credentials or known vulnerabilities like Zerologon to gain initial access. Berlin’s refusal to pay highlights a strategic move to disrupt the ransomware business model despite significant data loss.
Recommendations: Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all external-facing remote services and VPNs.; Immediately patch critical vulnerabilities, specifically targeting legacy flaws like CVE-2020-1472 (Zerologon).; Implement strict network segmentation to limit lateral movement within administrative networks.
Source: The Hacker News

Editorial note: this post summarizes third-party reporting and links to the original source.
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