A cybercriminal group that used voice phishing assaults to siphon greater than a billion data from Salesforce prospects earlier this yr has launched an internet site that threatens to publish information stolen from dozens of Fortune 500 companies in the event that they refuse to pay a ransom. The group additionally claimed accountability for a latest breach involving Discord consumer information, and for stealing terabytes of delicate recordsdata from 1000’s of shoppers of the enterprise software program maker Purple Hat.
The brand new extortion web site tied to ShinyHunters (UNC6040), which threatens to publish stolen information except Salesforce or particular person sufferer corporations comply with pay a ransom.
In Might 2025, a prolific and amorphous English-speaking cybercrime group often known as ShinyHunters launched a social engineering marketing campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their group’s Salesforce portal.
The primary actual particulars in regards to the incident got here in early June, when the Google Menace Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that ShinyHunters — tracked by Google as UNC6040 — was extorting victims over their stolen Salesforce information, and that the group was poised to launch a knowledge leak web site to publicly disgrace sufferer corporations into paying a ransom to maintain their data personal. A month later, Google acknowledged that considered one of its personal company Salesforce cases was impacted within the voice phishing marketing campaign.
Final week, a brand new sufferer shaming weblog dubbed “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” started publishing the names of corporations that had buyer Salesforce information stolen because of the Might voice phishing marketing campaign.
“Contact us to barter this ransom or all of your prospects information shall be leaked,” the web site said in a message to Salesforce. “If we come to a decision all particular person extortions towards your prospects shall be withdrawn from. No one else must pay us, for those who pay, Salesforce, Inc.”
Beneath that message had been greater than three dozen entries for corporations that allegedly had Salesforce information stolen, together with Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS. The entries for every firm specified the quantity of stolen information obtainable, in addition to the date that the knowledge was retrieved (the said breach dates vary between Might and September 2025).
Picture: Mandiant.
On October 5, the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters sufferer shaming and extortion weblog introduced that the group was liable for a breach in September involving a GitLab server utilized by Purple Hat that contained greater than 28,000 Git code repositories, together with greater than 5,000 Buyer Engagement Stories (CERs).
“Alot of folders have their shopper’s secrets and techniques reminiscent of artifactory entry tokens, git tokens, azure, docker (redhat docker, azure containers, dockerhub), their shopper’s infrastructure particulars within the CERs just like the audits that had been completed for them, and an entire LOT extra, and many others.,” the hackers claimed.
Their claims got here a number of days after a beforehand unknown hacker group calling itself the Crimson Collective took credit score for the Purple Hat intrusion on Telegram.
Purple Hat disclosed on October 2 that attackers had compromised an organization GitLab server, and mentioned it was within the strategy of notifying affected prospects.
“The compromised GitLab occasion housed consulting engagement information, which can embody, for instance, Purple Hat’s undertaking specs, instance code snippets, inner communications about consulting providers, and restricted types of enterprise contact info,” Purple Hat wrote.
Individually, Discord has began emailing customers affected by one other breach claimed by ShinyHunters. Discord mentioned an incident on September 20 at a “third-party customer support supplier” impacted a “restricted variety of customers” who communicated with Discord buyer help or Belief & Security groups. The data included Discord usernames, emails, IP tackle, the final 4 digits of any saved fee playing cards, and authorities ID pictures submitted throughout age verification appeals.
The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters declare they may publish information stolen from Salesforce and its prospects if ransom calls for aren’t paid by October 10. The group additionally claims it would quickly start extorting lots of extra organizations that misplaced information in August after a cybercrime group stole huge quantities of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is utilized by many company web sites to transform buyer interplay into Salesforce leads.
In a communication despatched to prospects right now, Salesforce emphasised that the theft of any third-party Salesloft information allegedly stolen by ShinyHunters didn’t originate from a vulnerability inside the core Salesforce platform. The corporate additionally harassed that it has no plans to satisfy any extortion calls for.
“Salesforce won’t have interaction, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand,” the message to prospects learn. “Our focus is, and stays, on defending the environment, conducting thorough forensic evaluation, supporting our prospects, and dealing with regulation enforcement and regulatory authorities.”
The GTIG tracked the group behind the Salesloft information thefts as UNC6395, and says the group has been noticed harvesting the information for authentication tokens tied to a spread of cloud providers like Snowflake and Amazon’s AWS.
Google catalogs Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters by so many UNC names (throw in UNC6240 for good measure) as a result of it’s regarded as an amalgamation of three hacking teams — Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters. The members of those teams hail from lots of the identical chat channels on the Com, a largely English-language cybercriminal group that operates throughout an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.
The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters darknet weblog is presently offline. The outage seems to have coincided with the disappearance of the group’s new clearnet weblog — breachforums[.]hn — which vanished after shifting its Area Identify Service (DNS) servers from DDoS-Guard to Cloudflare.
However earlier than it died, the web sites disclosed that hackers had been exploiting a important zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Enterprise Suite software program. Oracle has since confirmed {that a} safety flaw tracked as CVE-2025-61882 permits attackers to carry out unauthenticated distant code execution, and is urging prospects to use an emergency replace to deal with the weak point.
Mandiant’s Charles Carmichael shared on LinkedIn that CVE-2025-61882 was initially exploited in August 2025 by the Clop ransomware gang to steal information from Oracle E-Enterprise Suite servers. Bleeping Laptop writes that information of the Oracle zero-day first surfaced on the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters weblog, which revealed a pair of scripts that had been used to take advantage of susceptible Oracle E-Enterprise Suite cases.
On Monday night, KrebsOnSecurity acquired a malware-laced message from a reader that threatened bodily violence except their unspoken calls for had been met. The missive, titled “Shiny hunters,” contained the hashtag $LAPSU$$SCATEREDHUNTER, and urged me to go to a web page on limewire[.]com to view their calls for.
A screenshot of the phishing message linking to a malicious trojan disguised as a Home windows screenshot file.
KrebsOnSecurity didn’t go to this hyperlink, however as an alternative forwarded it to Mandiant, which confirmed that comparable menacing missives had been despatched to staff at Mandiant and different safety companies across the identical time.
The hyperlink within the message fetches a malicious trojan disguised as a Home windows screenshot file (Virustotal’s evaluation on this malware is right here). Merely viewing the booby-trapped screenshot picture on a Home windows PC is sufficient to trigger the bundled trojan to launch within the background.
Mandiant’s Austin Larsen mentioned the trojan is a commercially obtainable backdoor often known as ASYNCRAT, which is a .NET-based backdoor that communicates utilizing a customized binary protocol over TCP, and may execute shell instructions and obtain plugins to increase its options.
A scan of the malicious screenshot file at Virustotal.com reveals it’s detected as dangerous by practically a dozen safety and antivirus instruments.
“Downloaded plugins could also be executed straight in reminiscence or saved within the registry,” Larsen wrote in an evaluation shared by way of e-mail. “Capabilities added by way of plugins embody screenshot seize, file switch, keylogging, video seize, and cryptocurrency mining. ASYNCRAT additionally helps a plugin that targets credentials saved by Firefox and Chromium-based internet browsers.”
Malware-laced focused emails usually are not out of character for sure members of the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, who’ve beforehand harassed and threatened safety researchers and even regulation enforcement officers who’re investigating and warning in regards to the extent of their assaults.
With so many huge information breaches and ransom assaults now coming from cybercrime teams working on the Com, regulation enforcement companies on either side of the pond are below growing stress to apprehend the felony hackers concerned. In late September, prosecutors within the U.Ok. charged two alleged Scattered Spider members aged 18 and 19 with extorting no less than $115 million in ransom funds from corporations victimized by information theft.
U.S. prosecutors heaped their very own expenses on the 19 year-old in that duo — U.Ok. resident Thalha Jubair — who’s alleged to have been concerned in information ransom assaults towards Marks & Spencer and Harrods, the British foot retailer Co-op Group, and the 2023 intrusions at MGM Resorts and Caesars Leisure. Jubair additionally was allegedly a key member of LAPSUS$, a cybercrime group that broke into dozens of know-how corporations starting in late 2021.
A Mastodon put up by Kevin Beaumont, lamenting the prevalence of main corporations paying tens of millions to extortionist teen hackers, refers derisively to Thalha Jubair as part of an APT risk often known as “Superior Persistent Youngsters.”
In August, convicted Scattered Spider member and 20-year-old Florida man Noah Michael City was sentenced to 10 years in federal jail and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.
In April 2025, a 23-year-old Scottish man regarded as an early Scattered Spider member was extradited from Spain to the U.S., the place he’s dealing with expenses of wire fraud, conspiracy and identification theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of corporations in america and overseas, and that he personally managed greater than $26 million stolen from victims.
