Technology

They may be the bad guys, but they're not necessarily bad guys

This isn't ransomware. This is standard blackmail.

Agreed they definitely shouldn’t pay these guys.

unfolds chair

The enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.

Their cause is the money. Everything else is marketing.

Usually what happens is that these sorts of blackmailers will leak small, verifiable pieces of data so people know they really got something. We don't see that here, so for now there's no reason to take them seriously yet.

No. If Reddit would negotiate with them, they'd probably leak small subsets as proof that they have actual data that isn't available publicly. But with no negotiations, there's not really any need for that.

No, haha. They also didn't bother to check what was stolen, so they could have very well gotten 80G of memes.

If Reddit were to reach out privately to this group, the first thing they'd probably do is ask for proof. It's trivially easy to provide proof you've carried out a hack; you just present some specific information that was not public and describe what all else you have in specific enough terms they know you're not bluffing. (Or, I suppose you could just send them your whole dump if you really want to make it clear what all you have). The only way the rest of us will be able to validate these claims is if they leak and it either matches users' own private account info or Reddit issues a disclosure about the hack (which I'm pretty sure they're supposed to do regardless).

Money lol. If they do have it and reddit negotiates then they'll probably expect to be offered a higher price for dropping the API demand. They are just upping the ante.

I kind of assumed that everything that could be logged was, and that it would be data-mined insofar as value could be extracted from it down the line.

Well, assuming that this is even directly related to the forum, as opposed to, say, email logs from the Reddit internal email server or something, things that might not be public:

• Private messages between users.

• Browsing data. I mean, maybe a user only posts on /r/politics, and that's public, but spends a lot of time browsing /r/femdom or whatever.

• IP addresses of users. Might be able to associate multiple accounts held by a user.

• Passwords. While hopefully stored in a salted and hashed format, so they can't be simply trivially obtained, they can still be attacked via dictionary attacks, which is why people are told not to use short and predictable passwords.

• Email addresses (if a user registered one)

• Reddit has some private chat feature that I've never used, which I imagine is logged.

Well they mention Github artifacts in that message so it sounds like it's more like they may have obtained source code and that sort of non public stuff.

For context, based on historical pushshift data:

• 80gb zipped decompresses to ~1100GB of text data
• 80gb zipped would only be the most recent ~4 months of comments

They do indicate that the data they have is more valuable though, particularly pointing out how users are being tracked (GDPR alarm bells ringing) or censored.

Depends on what kind of data, if it’s mostly internal documents / dumps of whatever communication systems they use etc, it would not be too large (mostly because of retention policies on that software).

If it is actually the data straight from Reddit’s production databases, then 80GB does sound questionable. But then what kind of data are we talking about? Is it actually valuable?

Anyways, this is big (if true).

I'd be surprised if the data was just content. Memes and texts aren't particularly valuable.

However, data that can be used for tracking/developing user profiles such as what they're subscribed to, how active they are, and how they all link to one another is especially useful for conpetetitors and marketers. Plus any personal data such as emails and profiles. I wouldn't be surprised if you managed to get a huge amount of data under 80gb if it's just text (think how big a 80gb excel sheet would be)