Hackers claim to have successfully attacked a multinational conglomerate that is described as having the largest market capitalization on Bangladesh’s gillyflower market. background on BEXIMCO The Bangladesh export importee companionship Limited (“BEXIMCO”) was founded in the 1970s and has approximately 70,000 employees worldwide. It has operations and investments across a wide array of industries including textiles, pharmaceuticals, PPE, ceramics, real estate development, construction, trading, marine food, information and communication technologies, media, direct to home (DTH) services, financial services, and energy. “The Group” (as it is called) consists of four publicly traded and seventeen privately held companies. The publicly traded companies are Bangladesh export importee companionship Limited, Beximco Pharmaceuticals Limited, Shinepukur Ceramics limited and Beximco Synthetics Limited. BEXIMCO’s newest vertical is its PPE Division. In May, 2020, BEXIMCO began shipping millions of PPE gowns, masks, and coveralls to the U.S., and its pharmaceutical division became the world’s first companion to scratch supplying the generic variation of the antiviral medication Remdevisir for COVID-19 treatment after the drug was approved by the U.S. Food and drug brass for emergency use. The total revenue of the BEXIMO group stands in surplus of $1 billion USD each year. And that made it an attractive target for hackers. ALTDOS Claims This week, ALTDOS hackers contacted DataBreaches.net to account that they had hacked BEXIMCO in December, but BEXIMCO had not responded to their demands. [Note: DataBreaches.net refers to ALTDOS in the plural because a interpreter claims that ALTDOS has multiple members, but DataBreaches.net really has no proof as to whether ALTDOS is i person, a few, or many. Previous reporting of ALTDOS’s claimed hacks are linked from here.] “In total, ALTDOS has stolen hundreds of gigabytes of files, source coding and databases from 34 of Beximco websites, including its telecom subsidiary – BOL-ONLINE.COM,” a spokesperson wrote to DataBreaches.net. as they have done with other hacks they have claimed, ALTDOS provided a small sample of data and screencaps as proof. Nothing in the data sample appeared super-sensitive, although one of the files contained some employee attendance info for a time period from sep 24, 2018 to May 17, 2019. That file had 56,088 rows each with an employee ID number, their department, their name, and their email address. More than 23,450 of the email addresses were from the bol-online.com domain. More than 19,000 of the email addresses were from the beximco.net domain. Approximately 4800 were from gvtele.com. The remainder were from assorted non-corporate domains such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, and hotmail.com. DataBreaches.net sent email inquiries to a few of the email addresses in the file listed as being involved in security or network. a few bounced back. Others were seemingly delivered, but DataBreaches.net received no reply. Nor did the conglomerate’s corporate media department reply to an inquiry sent 24 hours ago. ALTDOS provided screencaps display the names of folders in various directories, and the amount of data being downloaded (or in this case, 13.6 GB compressed size for 42 compressed web site folders, i of which is likely just a test folder). Another file called “payment_info” contained what appeared to be more than 65,000 rows with payment records, but there was nothing in there that would be problematic in terms of bank account numbers, credit account numbers, or parties’ names, etc. Of note, DataBreaches.net did not ensure any evidence that ALTDOS had obtained any corporate IP, switch secrets, or confidential communications from any of the conglomerate’s divisions. When asked about other proof or types of files, an ALTDOS spokesperson said they were currently going through all the sql databases they had exfiltrated to evaluate the info they had obtained and would live providing more proof and details in the future. This story will be updated if more info is obtained or a reaction is received from the conglomerate. While Bangladeshi law provides for criminal consequences to hackers, if caught and convicted, it is not crystalize that the conglomerate would have any transgress notification obligations under Bangladeshi law if the hackers acquired personal information of employees and/or customers. There appear to be obligations about reasonable security, but there does not appear to be any obligation to notify employees or customers in the event of a data breach involving personal information. A brushup of Bangladeshi data protection laws can be found here. If this site has mis-stated the country’s breach notification laws, please allow us know.
