Yellow Pages Canada, a company that offers both online and print directory services, has reported a cyber attack resulting in the loss of customer data.

The hacking group, Black Basta, has claimed responsibility for collecting personal information from around 300,000 users during the attack.

The company has acknowledged the attack, stating that it occurred on or after March 15th, 2023.

Yellow Pages Canada has taken swift action to secure its networks and investigate the incident.

Yellow Pages Group, which was established in 1908, presently owns and manages several online services, including YP.ca, YellowPages.ca, and Canada411.

The Black Basta ransomware and extortion gang has claimed responsibility for the attack and has made sensitive documents and data available over the weekend.

After analyzing Black Basta’s online post, BleepingComputer has confirmed that the ransomware group leaked a sample of sensitive documents containing personal information.

This information is now publicly available and could potentially harm the affected individuals.

According to reports, the breach at Yellow Pages Group impacted certain employee and business customer data.

However, the company has not disclosed the specific type of data that was affected by the cyber attack.

Senior VP and CFO, Franco Sciannamblo, told Infosecurity in an email: “As soon as we became aware of the attack, we immediately commenced a thorough investigation into this issue with the assistance of external cybersecurity experts to contain the incident and ensure that we had secured our systems.”

“Based on our investigation to date, we have reason to believe that the unauthorized third party stole certain personal information from servers containing YP employee data and limited data relating to our business customers.“

Threat intelligence analyst, Dominic Alvieri, was the first to notice the cyber attack on the Yellow Pages Group.

He discovered that the Black Basta ransomware gang was sharing information about the company on their data leak website.

Upon further analysis of the post, it was confirmed that the ransomware group had indeed leaked a sample of sensitive documents that revealed personal information.

Black Basta, the same ransomware group responsible for the recent cyber attack on Yellow Pages Group, had also targeted the Canadian food retail giant Sobeys last year.

The attack caused IT issues and malfunctioning point-of-sale (POS) kiosks.

Additionally, earlier this month, the group claimed responsibility for another cyber attack, this time on Capita, a UK-based professional outsourcing provider.

In this instance, the group threatened to sell the stolen data to interested buyers unless Capita paid the ransom.