Italian football club Bologna FC says company data stolen during ransomware attack

A ransomware attack on Italian football club Bologna FC exposed data that will likely be leaked by the hackers, the organization said in a statement on Friday. 

Bologna FC, one of Italy’s oldest football teams, did not respond to requests for comment earlier this week but published a statement confirming the incident. 

“Bologna FC 1909 S.p.a. would like to communicate that a ransomware cyber attack recently targeted its internal security systems,” the organization said. “The crime resulted in the theft of company data which may appear online. Please be warned that it is a serious criminal offence to be in possession of such data or facilitate its publication or diffusion.”

The statement comes days after the RansomHub ransomware gang claimed to have attacked the football club. 

The group said it stole 200GB of data that included financial documents, medical records of players, confidential data on customers and employees as well as business plans. 

They made several threats towards Bologna FC, claiming that the stolen information will show the club is violating European data protection laws as well as other regulations from football bodies like FIFA and UEFA. 

Football and other sports organizations have increasingly become targets of financially-motivated cybercriminals.

The governing body for soccer in the Netherlands was attacked last year by the now-defunct LockBit ransomware gang, later confirming that they paid a ransom to protect the sensitive data of more than more than 1.2 million employees and members.

Hackers previously stole $1.2 million from a Premier League club by breaking into the email account of a team’s director during a transfer negotiation. The business email compromise almost allowed them to move the transfer fee into bank accounts controlled by the hackers.

A similar scheme was successfully conducted in 2018 on the email account of an Italian Series A soccer club official. More than $1.75 million was stolen by hackers who managed to siphon off payments made to the team by a streaming platform. The Spanish National Police eventually arrested 11 people involved in the hack in Barcelona in 2022.

The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released a report in 2020 that outlined a range of attacks, including a ransomware attack on a Premier League team that severely damaged its corporate systems, even crippling the turnstile system and nearly forcing the team to cancel a game.