The BlackCat ransomware group – also known as ALPHV, has just claimed responsibility for the hack targeting Reddit earlier this year and said it owns 80 GB of compressed data from this website.
According to Engadget, in February 2023, Reddit said it became the victim of a hack that collected internal documents, dashboards, code, and contracts, along with information about some advertisers, and current employees. current and former employees of the company. At the time, no data appeared to have been made public
In a post called The Reddit Files, BlackCat announced that it would delete the information if Reddit provided the hacker group with $4.5 million and changed the API price increase.
BlackCat obtained the information through a scheme to trick Reddit employees into accessing a website designed to look like a corporate intranet portal. An employee was tricked, allowing hackers to steal login credentials and a second authentication code. This person then self-reported the error, and experts believe that the security breach did not affect the personal information of Reddit users.
But months later, the hackers made their plan public in the wake of the Reddit community’s protest against the API price increase that Reddit offered. Rising costs are forcing popular third-party apps like Narwhal and Apollo to shut down, with Apollo founder Christian Selig claiming he’ll need to spend $20 million a year to keep the business afloat. Developers also fear the loss of third-party apps will lead to more censorship and less opportunity to increase ad revenue.
Despite the protests of the Reddit community, the company went ahead with its plan. In an interview with The Verge, Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman said: “These people are going crazy, they’re crazy because they used to get something for free, but now it won’t be free anymore.”. While Reddit shows no sign of reversing its decision, some advertisers have paused on the site while the outage continues.
It’s unclear how the new action from BlackCat will impact API prices, and Reddit has yet to comment on whether the company will respond to the increased demand. BlackCat claims Reddit ignored their two previous contact attempts in April and June, and there’s little hope that their ultimatum will make a difference. In the post, BlackCat said: “We believe Reddit will not pay any money for their data. We will make the data public.”