A cybercriminal group that used voice phishing assaults to siphon greater than a billion information from Salesforce clients earlier this 12 months has launched an internet site that threatens to publish knowledge stolen from dozens of Fortune 500 corporations in the event that they refuse to pay a ransom. The group additionally claimed duty for a current breach involving Discord consumer knowledge, and for stealing terabytes of delicate recordsdata from hundreds of consumers of the enterprise software program maker Purple Hat.
The brand new extortion web site tied to ShinyHunters (UNC6040), which threatens to publish stolen knowledge except Salesforce or particular person sufferer firms conform to pay a ransom.
In Might 2025, a prolific and amorphous English-speaking cybercrime group generally 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 concerning 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 knowledge, and that the group was poised to launch an information leak website to publicly disgrace sufferer firms into paying a ransom to maintain their information non-public. A month later, Google acknowledged that one in all 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 firms that had buyer Salesforce knowledge stolen because of the Might voice phishing marketing campaign.
“Contact us to barter this ransom or all of your clients knowledge can be leaked,” the web site said in a message to Salesforce. “If we come to a decision all particular person extortions in opposition to your clients can be withdrawn from. No one else must pay us, when you pay, Salesforce, Inc.”
Beneath that message have been greater than three dozen entries for firms that allegedly had Salesforce knowledge stolen, together with Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS. The entries for every firm specified the quantity of stolen knowledge 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 Studies (CERs).
“Alot of folders have their consumer’s secrets and techniques corresponding to artifactory entry tokens, git tokens, azure, docker (redhat docker, azure containers, dockerhub), their consumer’s infrastructure particulars within the CERs just like the audits that have been finished 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 clients.
“The compromised GitLab occasion housed consulting engagement knowledge, which can embody, for instance, Purple Hat’s mission 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 assist or Belief & Security groups. The knowledge included Discord usernames, emails, IP deal with, the final 4 digits of any saved cost playing cards, and authorities ID pictures submitted throughout age verification appeals.
The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters declare they may publish knowledge stolen from Salesforce and its clients if ransom calls for aren’t paid by October 10. The group additionally claims it should quickly start extorting lots of extra organizations that misplaced knowledge 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 clients at the moment, Salesforce emphasised that the theft of any third-party Salesloft knowledge allegedly stolen by ShinyHunters didn’t originate from a vulnerability inside the core Salesforce platform. The corporate additionally confused that it has no plans to fulfill any extortion calls for.
“Salesforce won’t interact, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand,” the message to clients learn. “Our focus is, and stays, on defending the environment, conducting thorough forensic evaluation, supporting our clients, and dealing with regulation enforcement and regulatory authorities.”
The GTIG tracked the group behind the Salesloft knowledge thefts as UNC6395, and says the group has been noticed harvesting the information for authentication tokens tied to a variety 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 considered an amalgamation of three hacking teams — Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters. The members of those teams hail from most of the similar 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 at the moment 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 have been exploiting a essential 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 clients to use an emergency replace to handle the weak point.
Mandiant’s Charles Carmakal shared on LinkedIn that CVE-2025-61882 was initially exploited in August 2025 by the Clop ransomware gang to steal knowledge 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 have been used to take advantage of susceptible Oracle E-Enterprise Suite cases.
On Monday night, KrebsOnSecurity obtained a malware-laced message from a reader that threatened bodily violence except their unspoken calls for have 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 screensaver file.
KrebsOnSecurity didn’t go to this hyperlink, however as an alternative forwarded it to Mandiant, which confirmed that related menacing missives have been despatched to workers at Mandiant and different safety corporations across the similar time.
The hyperlink within the message fetches a malicious trojan disguised as a Home windows screensaver file (Virustotal’s evaluation on this malware is right here). Merely viewing the booby-trapped screensaver 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 generally known as ASYNCRAT, a .NET-based backdoor that communicates utilizing a customized binary protocol over TCP, and might execute shell instructions and obtain plugins to increase its options.
A scan of the malicious screensaver file at Virustotal.com exhibits 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 net browsers.”
Malware-laced focused emails should 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 concerning the extent of their assaults.
With so many huge knowledge breaches and ransom assaults now coming from cybercrime teams working on the Com, regulation enforcement businesses on each side of the pond are below growing stress to apprehend the legal hackers concerned. In late September, prosecutors within the U.Okay. charged two alleged Scattered Spider members aged 18 and 19 with extorting no less than $115 million in ransom funds from firms victimized by knowledge theft.
U.S. prosecutors heaped their very own prices on the 19 year-old in that duo — U.Okay. resident Thalha Jubair — who’s alleged to have been concerned in knowledge ransom assaults in opposition to Marks & Spencer and Harrods, the British meals retailer Co-op Group, and the 2023 intrusions at MGM Resorts and Caesars Leisure. Jubair additionally was allegedly a key member of LAPSUS$, a cybercrime group that broke into dozens of know-how firms starting in late 2021.
A Mastodon publish by Kevin Beaumont, lamenting the prevalence of main firms paying tens of millions to extortionist teen hackers, refers derisively to Thalha Jubair as part of an APT menace generally 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 considered an early Scattered Spider member was extradited from Spain to the U.S., the place he’s going through prices of wire fraud, conspiracy and identification theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of firms in the USA and overseas, and that he personally managed greater than $26 million stolen from victims.
Replace, Oct. 8, 8:59 a.m. ET: A earlier model of this story incorrectly referred to the malware despatched by the reader as a Home windows screenshot file. Relatively, it’s a Home windows screensaver file.
