Security News > 2023 > June > Reddit confirms BlackCat gang pinched some data
Reddit this week confirmed ransomware gang BlackCat, aka AlphaV, broke into its corporate systems in February.
The BlackCat crooks claimed they stole 80GB of data during the intrusion and emailed Reddit about the break-in twice, once on April 13 and a second time on June 16.
"We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data," the BlackCat post continued, adding that they demanded $4.5 million to delete the stolen data and not make it public, and also want the social media giant to reverse its planned API price hike.
As we've pointed out in earlier stories about the pricing scheme: this adds up to tens of millions of dollars a year for popular third-party apps, such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync, which rely on the API to customize and improve the Reddit experience for forum moderators and netizens.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has since said that he's following the Elon Musk playbook, and that the API pricing plan will help the company turn a profit.
The makers of next-gen AI models have also been extracting a ton of training data from Reddit, and now Reddit is keen to get a slice of those developers' fortunes by making them pay for API access.