The Alphv/BlackCat ransomware gang has taken credit for the February 2023 cyberattack against social media site Reddit, claiming to have stolen 80 gigabytes of data.
Reddit disclosed the breach shortly after being hacked earlier this year and described the incident as the result of a sophisticated and highly targeted phishing attack in which an employee’s credentials and second-factor authentication tokens were stolen.
The attackers accessed internal documents, internal dashboards, business systems, source code, the information of hundreds of contacts and current and former employees, and advertiser data, Reddit said at the time, noting that it had no evidence that the attackers compromised production systems, user passwords or accounts.
Over the weekend, the Alphv/BlackCat ransomware gang listed Reddit on its leak site and claimed to have stolen 80GB of data. No file-encrypting ransomware appears to have been deployed on Reddit’s systems.
The attackers demand a $4.5 million ransom to be paid in exchange for deleting the stolen data and that Reddit drops the API pricing changes set to go into effect this week.
In May, the Alphv/BlackCat ransomware group claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on Canadian software company Constellation Software and on Western Digital.
Operating under the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, Alphv/BlackCat emerged in November 2021 as the first ransomware written in the Rust programming language. Believed to be linked to the Darkside/Blackmatter ransomware gang, Alphv/BlackCat had compromised more than 100 organizations by July 2022.
In addition to deploying file-encrypting ransomware, the group is known for engaging in additional extortion tactics, including stealing victim data and threatening to make it public, launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and harassing victim’s partners, employees, and customers.
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