The Reddit hacker demanded $4.5 million to prevent the release of the company’s data

Hacking group BlackCat has claimed responsibility for the February hacking attack on Reddit and is now asking for $4.5 million to prevent the release of 80 gigabytes of the company’s data.

The group also said Reddit should change its new API pricing policy, which has angered developers in recent weeks. “We’re pretty sure Reddit won’t pay for their data, but we’re very happy that users will soon know what data Reddit is tracking,” the hacker group said in a message this week. “In our latest email to Reddit, we have asked them for $4.5 million to prevent the release of the data.”

A few months after this hacker attack, Reddit confirmed that it faced a complex and organized attack and that the hackers gained access to some internal documents and data of the company. This data apparently relates to the information of former and current employees of Reddit and some customers and their contracts, and does not include passwords and data related to the accounts of Reddit users.

The BlackCat group also asked Reddit to stop raising the price of its API for third-party app developers. This price increase will cost developers several million dollars over the course of a year, and some of them may even be stopped forever. Of course, many subreddits are planning to protest this action of Reddit.

The BlackCat hacking group emerged in November 2021 and has hacked more than 100 companies by July 2022. The group has recently become more active and in March staged a hacking attack on Western Digital that stole around 10 terabytes of the company’s data. The group has also threatened one of Amazon’s subsidiaries, Ring, to release its data.

Source: DT