Developing: Someone claiming to be an “affiliate plus” for AlphV claims they were responsible for the Change Healthcare attack but that AlphV stole the payment Change Healthcare had made and suspended the affiliate’s account.

The affiliate’s claims appeared on Ramp Forum and have been circulating since then. The post can be seen below, via @vx-underground:

A ransomware affiliate is targeting publicly exposed Veritas installations to gain access to organizations.

In a New Year's Eve apology, the LockBit ransomware gang has expressed regret for attacking Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and sent a free decryptor so files can be unscrambled. According to Brett Callow, a B.C.-based threat analyst for Emsisoft, the gang posted a message on its site claiming the attack was the work of an affiliate and violated their rules.

Microsoft coined the term “human-operated ransomware” to clearly define a class of attack driven by expert humane intelligence at every step of the attack chain and culminate in intentional business disruption and extortion. In this blog, we explain the ransomware-as-a-service affiliate model and disambiguate between the attacker tools and the various threat actors at play during a security incident.