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Law firm hackers who stole secret documents of A-list celebs, threaten to expose Donald Trump’s ‘dirty laundry’

Speed News Desk | Updated on: 16 May 2020, 12:27 IST
hackers threaten to leak Donald Trump’s ‘dirty laundry’

As the world is going through a rough phase caused by the coronavirus a crisis has come into being for all the powerful and famous people out there. As we all know since the lockdown has been issued officials have seen a surge in the cybercrime. Elaborating on this an international celebrity law firm is going through a major crisis after a hacker group name ‘REvil’ aka ‘Sodinokibi’ stole personal details, emails of A-lists celebs.

The celebrity law firm, Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks represents A-listers such as Priyanka Chopra, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Jessica Simpson, Ella Mai, Facebook among others. As per the latest updates, the hackers have doubled their ransom to $42 million (317 crores) and have threatened the organization that if they failed to pay the amount then they will leak the “dirty laundry” of US President Donald Trump. Well, the organization is quite skeptical as Trump has never been their client so the connection behind this is quite unclear.


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Those who don’t know then let us tell you that this whole started from 8th May when the hackers posted the evidence of the stolen data. On the dark web Emsisoft, they posted a screenshot featuring Madonna’s contract for the 2019-20 “Madame X” tour.

 

Madonna's

 

On 11th May Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks came out and confirmed that they have suffered a breach and added that they have notified their clients and are working with experts to identify the hacker.

On 12th May the hacker’s group demanded $21 million as a ransom to keep the details as secret. However, the law firm refused to negotiate as the FBI is investigating the case. On seeing this on 13th May, the hackers allegedly tried to share 1GB of files to cloud storage service Mega, however, their account was terminated by Mega due to a breach of terms of service.

Taking to the social media hackers taunted the law firm for hiring ransomware remediation firm Coveware and called it a mistake to hire a recovery company in the negotiations.

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After seeing Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks is not taking their threat call seriously, on 14th May they doubled the amount and threatened to release the data on US President if they failed to pay the amount within a week.

According to Page Six, hacker’s group posted a message that read, “The ransom is now $42,000,000 … The next person we’ll be publishing is Donald Trump. There’s an election going on, and we found a ton of dirty laundry on time. Mr Trump, if you want to stay president, poke a sharp stick at the guys, otherwise, you may forget this ambition forever.”

They further added, “And to you voters, we can let you know that after such a publication, you certainly don’t want to see him as president … The deadline is one week.”

As per the reports, they have stolen the data worth 767GB of information that includes contracts, non-disclosure agreements, private contact information and have also obtained encrypted back-ups.

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First published: 16 May 2020, 11:42 IST