By: Natasha Archary

Hackers claiming to be behind the TransUnion cyber extortion last year say they are planning on leaking private financial data from South Africans unless they are paid R1.1 billion.
Jan Vermeulen, Editor of MyBroadBand joins Sizwe Dhlomo on 959 Breakfast to share more.
“A group calling themselves N4ughtySec, claim they’ve breached South Africa’s major credit bureaus TransUnion and Experian, and that they’ve never left the country.
There was an email sent out from the group yesterday (Thursday, 23 November), but I have my suspicions that the email is not from the hackers who breached TransUnion and Experian.
Instead it’s just a bunch of opportunists trying to see if they can squeeze TransUnion and Experian for money for leaks that have happened in the past.
The reason I don’t believe there’s any legitimacy to these claims is because the group misspelled their own name. So, N4ughtySec is spelt without the A after the number 4, so while the email account said N4ughtySec, the email address included the typo as follows: [email protected].”
Vermeulen says the other reason he feels this is a classic case of the “boy who cried wolf”, is because Experian’s system was not hacked, instead it was a social engineering attack.
This is in contrast to what the email claimed, leaving TransUnion and Experian with 72 hours to give into N4ughtySec’s demands.
“The N4ughtySec Group continues its mission. We have harvested all of TransUnion’s and Experian’s data files and systems as well as its clients data files and systems.
We are actively inside the IT networks of TransUnion, and Experian and its clients’.
We have remained silent since our last demands were not met. We never left.
Further demands were not met. We will now leak all data and files over the next 72-hours. The firestorm has commenced.”
An excerpt from the email the group of alleged hackers sent as published by MyBroadBand
Listen to the conversation on 959 Breakfast with Sizwe Dhlomo:
Also read: A political analyst’s insights on the Rand manipulation scandal
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