A ransomware gang claims to have hacked 1.5TB of data from FromSoftware owner Kadokawa

A ransomware gang claims to have hacked 1.5TB of data from Kadokawa, the owner of Elden Ring studio FromSoftware.

As noted on X by cyber security account FalconFeeds, the BlackSuit group has posted a message on the Dark Web in which it claims to have private information on Kadokawa employees, and will publish it if it isn’t paid enough.

“Our team gained access to the Kadokawa network almost a month ago,” the group claims, stating that it’s the reason “its business processes are being interrupted”.

The group says it has been able to download contracts, DocuSigned papers, legal papers, financial data and “other internal-use-only papers and confidential data”.

It also claims to have “personal info, payments, contracts, emails etc” from Kadokawa employees, the email and data usage of Kadokawa’s platform users, and other items such as presentations, coding and payment transactions.

The group says it will release the data on July 1, unless Kadokawa pays them enough money.

“Since we are people of business we are only interested in money,” it says. “Kadokawa is trying to settle the deal, but the amount of money they have offered is extremely low for this company.”

“Long story short, we have gained access to very personal information regarding Japanese citizens,” it adds.

“Those people would definitely like to keep the data related to their private life confidential, no one would like to see ‘things they are doing in the night’ going public, including their emails and browsing history.

“Kadokawas’ management should understand one thing, is that everything will go public if we will not make a deal until the end of this week.

“Right now the confidential life details of many Japanese citizens depend upon Kadokawas’ management decision. We dont think that Kadokawa’s top management would like to spend the following few months bending in excuses. Such exercises do not fit them at all. It would be much easier to pay and keep moving forward for such a company as Kadokawa is.”

BlackSuit has recently been accused of being responsible for outages at CDK Global, a software provides for around 15,000 North American car dealerships.