Reddit was asked for $ 4.5 million in ransom for 80 GB of confidential data

In March 2023, Reddit said it fell victim to an attack on internal documents, dashboards, programming code and contracts, along with the information of some advertisers, employees. current and former employees of the company. At that time, no data was made public.

Reddit is the forum with the largest number of members in the world, ranking 5th in the US in terms of traffic. The BlackCat ransomware group – also known as ALPHV, has just claimed responsibility for the hack targeting Reddit earlier this year and said it owns 80GB of compressed data from this website.

The hacker group also announced that it will delete the above data if Reddit pays this group of hackers $ 4.5 million and changes the price increase of the API (application programming interface that allows 3rd parties to operate on the Internet). this social network).

The hacker group penetrated and captured information by tricking Reddit employees into accessing a website designed to look like a corporate intranet portal. An employee was trapped, allowing hackers to steal credentials and authentication codes. This person then self-reported the error, and experts believe that the security breach did not affect the personal information of Reddit users.

However, when Reddit publicly announced its plan to increase the price of the API and was simultaneously opposed by the Reddit community, the hacker group conducted the world’s largest social network attack. The increase in API costs will force 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 it up and running. business. Developers also fear the loss of third-party apps will lead to more censorship and less opportunity to increase ad revenue.

Despite the objections of the Reddit community, this social network continues with its plan. Reddit thinks that it is very normal for third parties to have to pay to operate on this social networking platform. Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman said that third-party apps are used to benefiting from free Reddit.

In April 2023, Reddit also planned to start charging companies that use the social network’s data to train AI.