Sure, you could have an attack whose goal is to cause damage like what happened in the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 [1]. Or follow through on a direct blackmail a

Sure, you could have an attack whose goal is to cause damage like what happened in the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 [1]. Or follow through on a direct blackmail attempt of money for no disruption. Even if we limit ourselves to financially motivated actors there are plenty of ways to convert business disruption to money other than ransomware such as stock manipulation, competitive sabotage, etc.; they are just a little more sophisticated in the non-technical aspects. However, these tactics are quite rare currently because most hackers are extremely financially unsophisticated, being mostly young technically-minded people, so they focus more on the technical aspect of just doing more hacks rather than the business aspect of extracting the most value through solid financial engineering. We can see this by the fact that just a few years ago they would take down the same types of companies they are hitting now and ask for a ridiculously low sum of like $10k, but now they are asking for a much more reasonable, but still low $1M. Nothing changed about who they were attacking, they just slowly realized that they underestimated how much companies would pay for their "services" by a factor of 100x. That is a classic mark of a business amateur who has no idea just how much money is involved in B2B deals. But to your underlying question, yeah, it is probably ransomware. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_hack