French crypto tax company Waltio is being extorted by crypto hacking collective ShinyHunters, which claims to have stolen the personal details of almost 50,000 users and is now threatening to leak them.
Local media reports that Waltio, which calculates taxes due for crypto holders, has filed a legal complaint with the cybercrime unit of France’s Public Prosecution office for attempted extortion and the attack on its data systems.
ShinyHunters is a crypto ransomware group with countless extortion attempts under its belt. This week, it claims to have stolen the email addresses and crypto balances found within Waltio users’ 2024 tax reports, and are threatening to leak their details.
Read more: AT&T paid hacker 6 bitcoins to film deletion of stolen data
ShinyHunters was able to provide Waltio with a sample of the stolen data, but Le Parisian reports that banking, tax, and administrative data wasn’t included.
Waltio claimed in a security update that, “Our investigations show that this was not an active intrusion on our current production infrastructure; Waltio services are functioning normally, and user accounts and the production infrastructure are secure.”
It didn’t reveal what exactly led to the leak, and Waltio stressed that “no data allowing access to your crypto assets has been compromised.”
Previous ShinyHunters attacks have seen it extort telecommunications giant AT&T out of six bitcoins worth $373,000, threaten to release data stolen from Ticketmaster, and target a number of major Indian crypto exchanges.
The group works by extracting large amounts of data before demanding a crypto ransom for its return.
Read more: OpenAI, CoinTracker user data leaked after third-party hacked via SMS
Crypto users have become increasingly worried about the risk of physical attacks, known as “wrench attacks,” and a number of frequent crypto-related kidnappings in France helped fuel this panic.
Leaks such as Waltio’s, as well as those impacting larger crypto companies such as Coinbase and Ledger, can expose the details of users to online criminal markets where would-be kidnappers can buy that data and use it to target individuals.
It also exposes users to potential social engineering attempts, whereby criminals attempt to pass themselves off as an authority figure to trick victims into giving up key login credentials.
Waltio also warned any impacted users that the “main risk” following this hack is “targeted fraud: phishing, phone calls, SMS messages, and impersonation of customer service representatives.”
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Source: https://protos.com/french-crypto-tax-firm-targeted-in-shinyhunters-extortion-attempt/