The first ever incident possibly involving the ransomware family known as Maui occurred on April 15, 2021, aimed at an unnamed Japanese housing company.
The disclosure from Kaspersky arrives a month after U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies issued an advisory about the use of the ransomware strain by North Korean government-backed hackers to target the healthcare sector since at least May 2021.
Much of the data about its modus operandi came from incident response activities and industry analysis of a Maui sample that revealed a lack of “several key features” typically associated with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations.