Pour yourself a glass, this breach is dumber than last week’s every-vendor-PR-sprint. The ShinyHunters have staged another “extortion spree” and somehow C-suite bravery is measured in press releases, not in security controls. This isn’t a new vulnerability, it’s the same old playbook dressed up with a fancy website and a data dump that screams “we still don’t know how to stop people from stealing everything you own.”
What happened, in one sentence you’ll pretend to understand
A cybercriminal collective used voice phishing to siphon more than a billion Salesforce records and now threatens to publish stolen data from dozens of Fortune 500 firms if a ransom isn’t paid. They’ve also claimed responsibility for a Discord user data breach and for pilfering terabytes from thousands of Red Hat customers. It’s extortion as a commodity, the kind of thing that would earn a new case study in “how not to defend your crown jewels.”
Why this is not surprising
Because extortion has become the default business model for break-ins that should have been prevented by basic hygiene, and because vendors, CISOs, and IT culture treat breaches like PR hurdles rather than alarms. The attackers lean on familiar tricks—voice phishing, data theft, and threats of public data dumps—while defenders repeatedly chase after patch notes that arrive after the incident, not before it. The industry keeps promising “zero trust” and “lateral movement containment” while the data sits in plain sight, pulled out by a social-engineering nudge and a smile. And yes, I’m legally obligated to remind you that whiskey is not a replacement for secure configurations, but it does make hearing about these cycles a little less painful.
What to do is painfully practical, if you actually want to pretend you care
- Strengthen and validate your email and voice security. Train staff to recognize voice phishing and implement multi-factor authentication that isn’t easily bypassed by social engineering.
- Limit data exfiltration pathways and enforce strict data access controls. Segment data so that a breach doesn’t become a full data lake for miscreants to sample at will.
- Tighten vendor risk management. Require breach notification within hours, not weeks, and demand security engineering that isn’t measured by marketing buzzwords.
- Practice IR in real time. Run tabletop exercises that actually stress your incident response and avoid the “we patched it, so we’re safe” mindset.
- Monitor for sensitive data in the wild and utilize third-party risk intelligence to catch leaks before they hit the press and erase any pretenses of control.
Takeaway
Extortion is the business model and data is the asset. The only things aging faster than the attackers are the excuses we give for not fixing the basics. If you want real resilience, start with the simplest actions and stop treating every breach as an event to spin into a new product feature. For the full, unvarnished read, see the original reporting here.
