Last updated: September 29, 2026 at 8:42 AM UTC
All 891 Vulnerability 357 Breach 144 Threat 383 Defense 7
Tag: extortion (25 articles)Clear

Udemy customer and instructor data leaked publicly after ShinyHunters' extortion deadline expires - 1.4 million records including PayPal payout details

Online learning giant Udemy's customer and instructor data was leaked publicly today after the company refused to pay ShinyHunters' extortion demand. Have I Been Pwned added the breach yesterday with 1.4 million unique email addresses. The dataset goes well beyond contact information: it includes full names, physical addresses, phone numbers, employer details, and instructor payout methods - PayPal email addresses, mailing addresses for cheques, and bank transfer details. Udemy was listed on ShinyHunters' 'pay or leak' portal April 24 with a three-day deadline. The company has not publicly confirmed the breach or said how attackers got in.

Check
Reset your Udemy password if you have an account, especially if you're an instructor with payout details on file, and watch for highly targeted phishing.
Affected
Udemy customers and instructors with accounts before April 2026, particularly instructors whose PayPal addresses, cheque mailing addresses, and bank transfer details are in the leak. Any organization using Udemy for staff training has employee details exposed and should expect tailored phishing referencing real course history.
Fix
Reset Udemy passwords and rotate any password reused on other accounts. Instructors should monitor PayPal and bank accounts and contact PayPal to flag the email as compromised. Brief staff that any 'Udemy' email referencing their real course history is potentially hostile - go to udemy.com directly rather than clicking links. Add Udemy lookalike domains to your DMARC monitoring.

ADT confirms breach after ShinyHunters claims 10 million records stolen via vishing-compromised Okta SSO and Salesforce exfil

ADT, the largest US home security company, filed an SEC 8-K on April 24 confirming a breach detected April 20. ShinyHunters listed ADT on its 'pay or leak' portal claiming over 10 million records with an April 27 deadline. ADT says the dataset was limited to names, phone numbers, addresses, plus DOBs and last-four SSN/Tax IDs for a small subset; no payment data was accessed and alarm systems were unaffected. Initial access was a vishing attack against an employee that compromised an Okta SSO session, which attackers used to reach ADT's Salesforce - the same playbook ShinyHunters ran against Carnival.

Check
If you run Salesforce behind Okta or another SSO, audit conditional-access policies this week and assume vishing-driven session-hijack is a credible vector for your tenant.
Affected
ADT customers, particularly the prospective customers confirmed in the dataset. From a security standpoint: any organization using Salesforce behind SSO without device-bound auth or per-session re-auth on bulk exports. The pattern across ShinyHunters victims (Carnival, ADT, Zara, 7-Eleven) shows MFA alone does not stop this group once help-desk vishing succeeds.
Fix
Brief frontline staff on the vishing pattern: spoofed VoIP, attacker poses as IT, walks user through MFA enrollment. Run a tabletop. In Okta and Entra ID, alert on new device registrations and on bulk Salesforce exports outside business hours. Tighten Permission Set Groups for bulk exports. Consider FIDO2 or platform passkeys for any role with bulk customer-data access.

New extortion group 'BlackFile' running seven-figure ransom campaigns against retail and hospitality via vishing-driven SSO compromise and Salesforce/SharePoint scraping

Palo Alto's Unit 42 and the Retail & Hospitality ISAC outed a new financially-motivated group tracked as BlackFile (CL-CRI-1116, UNC6671, Cordial Spider) running data-theft extortion against retail and hospitality since February 2026 with seven-figure ransoms. The playbook: spoofed-VoIP vishing, attackers posing as IT helpdesk, victims routed to phishing pages capturing Microsoft Entra/Okta/Google SSO credentials, attackers then register their own devices to bypass MFA and pivot into Salesforce and SharePoint. Unit 42 links the group to 'The Com' and notes it has used swatting against non-paying victims. TTPs overlap heavily with ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider.

Check
Brief IT helpdesk staff this week on the BlackFile vishing pattern and run a tabletop on a help-desk-driven SSO compromise of one named individual.
Affected
Retail and hospitality are named target sectors but the playbook is industry-agnostic. Acute risk: any organization where helpdesk staff can re-enroll MFA devices over the phone without out-of-band caller verification. SaaS environments where users can perform bulk Salesforce report exports, SharePoint downloads, or Microsoft Graph queries without secondary controls.
Fix
Require manager confirmation on a separate channel for any MFA or password reset on high-privilege accounts. Disable phone-based helpdesk MFA reset for accounts with bulk-data access. In Okta and Entra, alert on new device registrations from unseen locations. In Salesforce, scope bulk export rights via Permission Set Groups and alert on Bulk API usage outside business hours.

Carnival confirms 7.5 million Holland America Mariner Society loyalty records leaked after ShinyHunters refused extortion deadline

Carnival Corporation has been confirmed as a ShinyHunters breach victim, and the data is now public. Have I Been Pwned added the breach on April 23 with 7,531,359 unique email addresses drawn from 8.7 million records. The data comes from the Mariner Society loyalty program operated by Holland America Line, one of Carnival's cruise brands, and contains full names, dates of birth, genders, email addresses, and loyalty program status fields. ShinyHunters initially listed Carnival on its 'pay or leak' portal on April 18 with an April 21 deadline alongside Zara, 7-Eleven, and roughly 40 other organizations. When Carnival did not pay, the group published the dataset on its leak site this week. Carnival confirmed to reporters that the initial access came from a phishing compromise of a single employee account - a reminder that ShinyHunters continues to rely on human-layer intrusion rather than novel exploits. For anyone whose email, date of birth, or customer record appears in the dataset, the immediate risk is highly targeted phishing and account-takeover attempts that reference genuine Holland America booking details.

Check
If your organization has ever done corporate bookings, incentive travel, or employee perks through Holland America, Princess, or other Carnival brands, notify affected staff today and watch for cruise-themed phishing referencing genuine loyalty-program details over the coming weeks.
Affected
Anyone who has a Mariner Society loyalty account with Holland America Line, and by extension anyone who has booked a Holland America cruise through loyalty channels. The exposed fields (name, date of birth, email, gender, loyalty status) are foundational identity data - strong enough to power convincing impersonation, knowledge-based authentication bypass, and targeted spear-phishing.
Fix
Check Have I Been Pwned to confirm whether your address is in the Carnival dataset. If it is, watch for phishing emails pretending to be from Holland America or other Carnival brands that reference your real past bookings or loyalty tier - treat any such message as hostile and navigate to the Holland America site directly rather than clicking links. Rotate passwords on any account that shares a password with Mariner Society. At an organizational level, add 'holland-america.com' and 'hollandamericafund.com' lookalike domains to your DMARC and brand-monitoring watchlists, and brief travel-desk staff that any Mariner Society outreach should be verified by phone.

ShinyHunters breach SaaS integrator Anodot, steal auth tokens to raid Snowflake customers - 12+ companies hit

ShinyHunters breached Anodot, an AI-based data anomaly detection platform acquired by Glassbox in late 2025, and stole authentication tokens that connected Anodot to its customers' cloud environments. Using those tokens, the attackers accessed Snowflake data warehouses belonging to over a dozen companies and began exfiltrating data last Friday - timed to the Easter/Passover holiday for maximum dwell time. ShinyHunters also attempted to use the stolen tokens against Salesforce instances but were blocked by AI detection. The group is now extorting affected companies, demanding ransom payments to prevent data release. Anodot's customer list includes Puma, SAP, T-Mobile, and UPS. This is the same playbook ShinyHunters used in the 2025 Snowflake campaign and the Gainsight/Salesforce attacks - breach a trusted integration, not the platform itself.

Check
Audit every third-party SaaS integration connected to your Snowflake, Salesforce, or other cloud data platforms. Identify which ones hold active authentication tokens with read access to your data.
Affected
Any organization using Anodot (now Glassbox) integrations connected to Snowflake, Salesforce, S3, or Amazon Kinesis. Broader risk: any company with SaaS-to-SaaS integrations that use long-lived OAuth tokens or API keys.
Fix
Revoke and rotate all authentication tokens for Anodot/Glassbox integrations immediately. Review Snowflake query logs for unusual data access patterns since late March. Enable network policies to restrict Snowflake access by IP. Audit all third-party integrations for least-privilege access - most SaaS connectors have broader permissions than they need. Monitor for ShinyHunters extortion communications.