Federal investigators examining ShinyHunters have uncovered potential links between the extortion group and executives at two ransomware negotiation firms, according to a KrebsOnSecurity report published on October 19. An executive at an unnamed U.S. consulting firm (reportedly 1,000+ employees) allegedly helped operate the group's extort…
Dutch police arrested a 24-year-old Amsterdam man on September 15 on suspicion of playing a role in the ShinyHunters criminal organisation. Police have not named him, but Brian Krebs identified him as Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted hacker. A search of his laptop reportedly turned up details of two murders "to be committed abroad", which…
Episode 488 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Paul Ducklin, covers several recent security stories. The lead item is the arrest by the FBI of an executive at a ransomware negotiation firm, reportedly at a cybersecurity conference, in connection with the investigation into the ShinyHunters gang. The hosts…
In July 2026, the cloud-based business communications platform RingCentral was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group subsequently published data it claimed to have obtained from the platform, covering 1.6M unique email addresses along with names, physical addresses and phone numbers. RingCentral stated in …
In August 2026, clothing retailer Carhartt was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group published data allegedly taken from the company, including 12.9M unique email addresses, names, phone numbers and physical addresses. The leaked corpus also held millions of synthetic records unrelated to real individuals,…
In August 2026, French intellectual property software and services company Questel was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group published a large corpus of data it claimed to have taken from the company. The data is largely corporate contact information tied to sales leads, support cases and marketing activit…
In September 2026, Swiss medical device company Medela was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The data allegedly obtained in the breach was later published and covers about 424k unique email addresses, mostly belonging to healthcare professionals, Medela staff and sales leads. Have I Been Pwned added the dataset …
In August 2026, data centre operator CyrusOne was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion attempt. The group later published data allegedly stolen from the company, covering about 373k unique email addresses across records for users, sales leads and CyrusOne employees. The data is mostly corporate contact information, and also …
In January 2026, the company intelligence platform Crunchbase was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion attempt. Data allegedly stolen from the company was later published, covering about 560k unique email addresses, mostly belonging to leads and business contacts. Crunchbase subsequently confirmed that a threat actor had exf…
In August 2026, the food and animal safety company Neogen was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion attempt. The group later published data it claimed to have obtained from Neogen. The data consists largely of corporate contact records and includes 436k unique email addresses drawn from mailing lists, employee records and oth…
In August 2026, the digital health company Sharecare was targeted in a ShinyHunters "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group subsequently published data it claimed was taken from Sharecare's systems, containing 318k unique email addresses. Most of the data consists of B2B sales and marketing records, including names, physical addresses…
Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) analysed the leak that ShinyHunters attributed to Carhartt. The leak was claimed to hold more than 50 GB of customer and employee records. The initial extraction showed 24,876,077 unique email addresses. Closer review showed that a large share came from the TPC-DS benchmark dataset (tpcdssf1000) store…
Troy Hunt's weekly update reports two arrests linked to the ShinyHunters cybercrime group: an individual named Pepijn in the Netherlands and another named Saif in Jordan. Hunt calls the arrests an inevitable and likely outcome. He expects more members to follow, and anticipates substantial custodial sentences given the seriousness of the …
In his weekly update, Troy Hunt notes that the ShinyHunters group appears to be on an escalating trajectory, reportedly targeting both the Cl0p ransomware group and the FBI. Hunt describes this as feeling like a crescendo in the group's activities and says that provoking US federal law enforcement is unlikely to help the group's longevity…
A Semperis annual ransomware risk report, covered by The Register, finds that 37% of ransomware attacks involved psychological or physical threats against victim staff. The survey covered 1,200 post-ransomware organizations in the first half of 2026. Respondents reported psychological intimidation (23%) and physical threats (17%), aimed a…