FBI: Get to know your IT guy – extortion crews are visiting law firms pretending to be tech support
The FBI has issued a warning to law firms about the Silent Ransom Group, which has been impersonating IT staff to extort sensitive data. This group has been active since 2022 and has recently escalated its tactics by physically visiting law offices. Law firms are advised to secure their USB ports to prevent unauthorized access to their systems.
- ▪The Silent Ransom Group has been targeting US law firms since 2022.
- ▪Criminals are posing as IT staff and physically entering law offices to plug in thumb drives.
- ▪The FBI has reported fresh attacks in Spring 2026, indicating an increase in the group's activities.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/27/fbi-crooks-enter-legal-offices-and-steal-data-via-usb-drive/5247212 |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 18:15:52 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T16:43:01.932Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T16:43:01.932Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | IASFx7ymOoSb |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); Security FBI: Get to know your IT guy – extortion crews are visiting law firms pretending to be tech support Cybercriminals still allowed to walk into office blocks and convince staff to let them plug in their own thumb drives Connor Jones Connor Jones Cybersecurity reporter Published wed 27 May 2026 // 17:15 UTC The FBI is warning unsuspecting lawyers that their firms continue to be an active target for members of a longstanding extortion crew.Silent Ransom Group has been operating…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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