An unnamed group of hackers have threatened Belgian lender Elantis, a subsidiary of Dexia Bank, to publish customer data online unless its pays the €150,000 by tomorrow.
In a statement on Pastebin, the hackers claimed to have taken information about Elantis customers, including names, income, ID card numbers and contact details, from an unprotected and unencrypted on Elantis servers.
"We contacted Dexia over the weekend to offer them not to publicly release this data over the Internet if they agreed to pay us the equivalent of roughly EUR 150,000 before Friday, May 4th [sic]," the group wrote. It does not consider the demands to be blackmail, it said, but rather an "idiot tax" for Elantis storing customer information insecurely.
Speaking to the Dutch arm of Reuters, an Elantis spokesperson confirmed that the hackers had taken data from its website, and that an anonymous group had been in touch with the company to demand money in exchange for the non-release of its customers' data.
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The spokesperson claimed that the stolen data could not be used to commit fraud. The company said that a police investigation had been launched, and that it had taken its website offline.
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