Stoney Creek Furniture Targeted by Medusa Ransomware Group

Stoney Creek Furniture, a well-known retailer, has reportedly been targeted by the infamous Medusa ransomware group. The Stoney Creek Furniture cyberattack was claimed by the hacker collective via the dark web, accompanied by a threatening ultimatum of four days. In a recent post, the hacker collective mentioned an unspecified amount of $20,000 without further clarification.

About 50 years ago, Stoney Creek Furniture was a small town store in Stoney Creek. Today, it is one of the largest furniture showrooms in Canada. Its showroom is filled with over 250 fully decorated rooms, displays, and salespeople who genuinely care about customers and offer excellent design advice.

The Rise of Medusa Ransomware

Medusa is a RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) that made its debut in the summer of 2021 and has evolved to be one of the more active RaaS platforms. Attack volumes were inconsistent in the first half of 2023 with a resurgence of attack activity in the last half of 2023. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software as well preventing recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting VSS Shadow Copies to thwart encryption rollback.

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and have been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appear to have waned somewhat in the second quarter. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay.

How Medusa Operates

The Medusa RaaS operation (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or through malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments (there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.)

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and public sector organizations too. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, but they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.