Reportedly, the crime group accessed more than 350GB of stolen data related to data dumps of mail servers, databases, confidential documents, contracts and other sensitive material.

The extortion group ShinyHunters has been linked to the recent (24 March) breach of the European Commission’s Europa.eu platform, in which a reported 350GB of data, across multiple databases, was accessed and stolen. 

In a statement issued after the incident (27 March), the European Commission stated that its early findings suggest that private data had been accessed and it would be contacting EU entities affected by the attack. The Commission’s internal systems are not believed to have been affected.

The Commission explained it will continue to monitor the situation, taking the necessary precautions to ensure the security of its systems and data, as well as work to analyse what happened so it can use the results to improve its cybersecurity capabilities.

While the Commission has not shared further details on the incident, alleged data dumps uploaded to ShinyHunters’ Tor data leak site are said to include content from mail servers, internal communications systems, databases, confidential documents, contracts and additional sensitive material. 90GB of information allegedly stolen from the European Commission’s compromised cloud network has already been shared. 

ShinyHunters is an extortion group established around 2020 that has carried out a number of high-profile, financially-motivated attacks on groups such as Salesforce, Allianz Life, SoundCloud and Ticketmaster. The criminal organisation also claimed responsibility for an attack on Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Meetic, Match.com and OkCupid. 

In July 2024, AT&T paid a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group $370,000 to delete the data of millions of customers following a massive data breach of its systems. Reportedly, the stolen data exposed the calls and texts of nearly all of the phone network’s 110m cellular customers after ShinyHunters stole the information from the cloud data giant Snowflake.

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