A new hacking group that breached the systems of a French multinational corporation has given the firm until Thursday to cough up the ransom dough: $125,000 USD worth of baguettes.
On Monday, Hellcat, a new cybercrime enterprise of which little is known, posted to its dark web ransomware leak site that it had successfully breached the global energy management and digital automation company’s Atlassian Jira infrastructure and stolen “more than 40 GB of compressed data.”
“To secure the deletion of this data and prevent its public release, we require a payment of $125,000 USD in Baguettes,” the statement read.
“Stating this breach will decrease the ransom by 50%, its your choice Olivier…”
The group may be referring to Olivier Blum, who was appointed as Schneider’s new CEO on Monday.
In statements to multiple media outlets, including Forbes, the company confirmed it is investigating an incident involving one of its “internal project execution tracking platform” and that “products and services remain unaffected.”
The threat was hinted at on Sunday by an X user known as @grepcn who seemed to taunt the company in a post.
Tech news website bleepingcomputer.com said the user, a “threat actor” who goes by Grep and is a Hellcat member, told them the information included “75,000 unique email addresses and full names for Schneider Electric employees and customers.”
After Hellcat’s statement on Monday, Grep posted it to X again, along with claims Hellcat claimed to have published information obtained in hacks of Jordan’s Minister of Education and Tanzania’s College of Business.
Cyberscoop.com suggests the baguette order is merely a tongue-in-cheek reference to Schneider’s home in France. The actual form of currency they want is a cryptocurrency known as Monero, preferred for its privacy and anonymity.
Hüseyin Can Yuceel, a security researcher who spoke to Forbes, said the bread is just the new hacking group’s way of “trying to get attention and establish trust for future victims and associates for a possible Ransomware-as-a-Service operation.”
As recently as last year, ABC News reported the average price of a baguette in France to be about 90 cents.
This is Schneider’s third breach in under two years. In February, its sustainability business division was hit with a ransomware attack and it was also compromised in the June 2023 MOVEit attacks by the Russian-based Cl0p ransomware group.
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