US plastic surgeon clinic data exposed by Hunters International

Newly emergent ransomware operation Hunters International has exposed pre-operation photos of patients stolen from the systems of a U.S. plastic surgeon's clinic, The Register reports. Such a leak, which was followed by the exposure of the patients' names, addresses, and videos, has been done by Hunters International to prove its claimed theft of 248,245 files from the clinic and accelerate ransom negotiations. Hunters International has been associated by various cybersecurity researchers with the now-defunct Hive ransomware gang, with Zscaler ThreatLabz noting that both operations had a nearly 60% similarity in their ransomware encryption codes, as well as nearly identical backend code in their victim ransom portals. However, such an association has been debunked by Hunters International. "All of the Hive source codes were sold including the website and old Golang and C versions and we are those who purchased them. Unfortunately for us, we found a lot of mistakes that caused unavailability for decryption in some cases. All of them were fixed now. As you may see here, encryption is not our primary goal, that's why we didn't do it by ourselves," said Hunters International.