Schneider Electric is a French energy management company that has been involved in an increasingly common situation for many organizations: the hacking of their data. The company has confirmed to Bleeping Computer that has suffered a security breach whereby malicious actors have accessed 40 GB of internal data project management tracking, as well as ‘issues and add-ons’. Nothing extraordinary, given the constant growth of cybercrimes, but with a surprise in this case: Hackers demand ransom for stolen data baguettes; specifically, baguettes worth $125,000.
One of the hackers, under the pseudonym grep in xformerly Twitter, published a message this Monday addressed to Schneider Electric in which it said: ‘Hello, @SchneiderElec, how was your week? Did someone accidentally steal your data and they noticed it, turned off the services and restarted without finding it? Now they have gone out again, but it seems that the criminals have taken more juicy data.’
Hours after the initial post, Grep shared a screenshot showing dozens of lines of code that he claimed were ‘proof of the Schneider Electric breach.’ The code appears to involve multiple users and tickets from JIRA project management software..
Some proof about Schneider Electric breach pic.twitter.com/luJmrZWDMx
— grep (@grepcn) November 4, 2024
Grep explained to BleepingComputer, in a conversation on signalwho had logged into Schneider’s Jira server using compromised credentials and then extracted 400,000 rows of data of users through a MiniOrange REST API. Grep claimed that the loot obtained contained 75,000 unique email addresses, plus full names of Schneider Electric employees and customers.
The energy company confirmed the gap and stated that it was ‘investigating a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to one of its internal project execution tracking platforms, which is hosted in a sandboxed environment.’ According to the company, none of its products or services have been affected by the incident.
The hackers claim, in a screenshot of the dark web published by the outlet, that they hope that the French company pays ‘125,000 dollars in baguettes’. The ransom would supposedly prevent Grep from sharing the stolen data publicly, although If Schneider recognizes the gap, as it has, the requested amount will be reduced by 50%. That is, $62,500.
Obviously, hackers don’t really expect to receive thousands and thousands of baguettes, but rather hard cash. The extravagant request is rather an easy prank taking advantage of the fact that the headquarters of the hacked company is located in Paris. At the moment, it is unknown if Schneider Electric has agreed to the payment.