Reddit confirms BlackCat gang pinched some data Reddit this week confirmed ransomware gang BlackCat, aka AlphaV, broke into its corporate systems in February. The crew just the other day had bragged it stole 80GB from the biz, and had demanded the social media company pay $4.5 million to keep a lid on the data as well as ditch its controversial API pricing changes. A …
Sounds like the authorities can have a good assumption that these hackers are part of the Reddit user base.
If they had just gone for the cash it would be like any other ransom attack from the ether.
They want a policy change, which indicates they are\were likely consumers of the service and have a personal interest in the change.
Don't be such a juicy target. Follow best practices to secure data and systems, and of course don't be viciously nasty, callous, incompetent jerks on top of it. Reddit's a very juicy target because its ownership, administrators and staff are arrogant to the extreme and are masters at doing inexplicably tone-deaf and stupid things at the worst possible moments. Medical providers are very juicy targets because they're infamous for utter incompetence in securing patient data and related infrastructure (they heal people, not build IT infrastructure, and they have a well-deserved reputation for getting security wrong). Nvidia's a juicy target because they're one of just a handful of vendors of highly sought-after products but have a reputation for being malicious and anti-competitive in their market and notably hostile towards open-source development.
Being notorious (for good or ill) doesn't just attract desirable attention. It attracts groups like these more than being boring does.
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