IPO-bound Pine Labs to probe source of ransomware attack

Pine Labs on Wednesday said a recently alleged data breach at the digital payments and merchant commerce services provider’s end relates to 2014 legal business contracts, and that its current systems are fully secured.

The Noida-based company is “however investigating this to see if any user laptop or server was the source of this information,” as per a statement from CTO Sanjeev Kumar on the matter.

The statement was issued on the backdrop of an August 11 dated blogpost from Y Combinator backed cyber intelligence firm Cyble.

The blogpost said that Cyble Research Lab discovered a ransomware attack meted on Pine Labs.

The attack, carried out by an outfit called BlackMatter, affected multiple financial institutions using Pine Labs services across India.

It exposed data such as service and other private agreements between multiple Indian banks or institutions and Pine Labs, multiple financial reports, and over 500,000 unique records of contact information of individuals.

"Pine Labs continues to be one of the most secured and compliant PCI-DSS platforms. We can confidently state that our systems continue to be fully secured and our production systems continue to operate as usual and all customer data is safe,” Kumar said in the statement.

BlackMatter is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) that comprises a core group of developers who maintain the ransomware and payment sites as well as recruited affiliates or “customers” who rent the ransomware, breach victims’ networks and encrypt devices, as per British security software and hardware company Sophos.

“The BlackMatter ransomware collects information from victim machines like hostname, logged in user, operating system, domain name, system type (architecture), language, as well as the size of the disk and available free space,” Sophos’ director of engineering Mark Loman had said in a report earlier this month.

Mastercard backed payments unicorn Pine Labs, which is expected to launch an IPO in 2022, last month secured $600 million in a round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company and new investor BlackRock.

Founded in 1998 by Rajul Garg, Pine Labs started out as a point-of-sale (PoS) provider. Garg quit the company in 2003, which led to Lokvir Kapoor taking over the company. Amrish Rau, co-founder of payments company Citrus Pay (acquired by PayU in 2016), joined as CEO in 2020.