Report: Hacker Group Demands Reddit Reverse Plans to Charge Fees

A hacker group has reportedly raised the stakes after getting no response from Reddit.

The group known as BlackCat is now not only demanding a $4.5 million ransom from Reddit but also demanding that the social media company reverse its plans to start charging fees to some third-party Reddit apps — a plan that led to widespread protests among users of the platform last week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (June 20).

BlackCat is also threatening to leak the data it stole from Reddit in February, according to the report.

Reddit announced its plans to implement new developer fees in April, saying they will go into effect July 1, the report said.

Many of the social media platform’s communities protested the plans by ceasing their operations for two days last week, per the report.

The company had said that it can no longer subsidize third-party Reddit apps that are commercial entities and account for large-scale data use, according to the report.

Reddit said in a February post that it had suffered a “security incident” in which hackers gained access to “some internal documents, code and some internal business systems.”

The company added in the post that it had found that user passwords and accounts were safe.

“Exposure included limited contact information for (currently hundreds of) company contacts and employees (current and former), as well as limited advertiser information,” Reddit said in the post. “Based on several days of initial investigation by security, engineering and data science (and friends!), we have no evidence to suggest that any of your non-public data has been accessed, or that Reddit’s information has been published or distributed online.”

PYMNTS research has found that business email compromise (BEC) — in which criminals impersonate company executives or business partners to deceive employees into diverting funds their way — is the costliest form of cybercrime.

BEC accounts for fully one-third of all the money lost to cybercrime as well as causes reputational damage to businesses, according to “The Hidden Costs of B2B Payments Fraud,” the November edition of the “B2B Payments Fraud Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and nsKnox collaboration.