Hackers are threatening to leak out personal and confidential information stolen from Reddit. The hackers demanded a ransom amount and reversed its controversial API price hikes. Reddit recently announced that it would begin charging for its API.
Previously, Reddit’s API was free for developers who wanted to establish apps and bots that assist people using Reddit. Steve Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Reddit,” But companies that crawl Reddit for data and don’t return any of that value.”
In addition, he also said that “it’s good time for us to tighten things up; we think that’s fair.” The BlackCat Ransomware group, also known as ALPHV, claims to have taken 80 gigabytes of compressed data from Reddit during a February system hack in a post on its dark web leak website.
Gina Antonini, the Reddit spokesperson, confirmed that BlackCat’s claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9. Christopher Slowe, Reddit CTO, said that hackers had used employee information and internal documents during a highly targeted phishing attack. Slowe added that the company had no evidence that the hackers had stolen personal user data, such as accounts and passwords.
Though, Reddit has not shared the complete details about the leaked information and attack or who was behind the attack. However, BlackCat claimed all the responsibility for the February intrusion and threatened to reveal confidential personal data stolen during the breach.
Still, it needs to be clarified what sort of data has been stolen by the attackers, and BlackCat is not ready to share any evidence of data theft.
BlackCat was also connected to a March hack to Western Digital in which ten terabytes of data, including reams of customer data, were stolen from the company.
Moreover, the group was also threatened to expose data purportedly stolen from Ring—a video surveillance company owned by Amazon, in the same month.
In addition, a post published on Saturday named “The Reddit Files” BlackCat claims it contacted Reddit twice. The first time was on April 13, and the other was on June 16, but I have yet to receive a response.
According to BlackCat, “I told them in my first email that I would wait for their IPO to come along. But this seems like the perfect opportunity! We are confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data; we expect to leak it”.
According to the sources, it has been revealed that hackers are demanding $4.5 million in exchange for deleting the stolen data and for Reddit to withdraw Its API pricing changes.
On the other hand, Reddit’s new revised API pricing plans have become controversial in recent weeks. Apollo has announced closing its operations due to the latest pricing. At the same time, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest due to the new API policy.
Previously, Reddit also faced a massive, serious data breach in 2018 that witnessed attackers access a complete set of information of Reddit data from 2007. The information included emails, passwords, usernames, public posts, and mad private messages.
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