Ransom Demanded Dropped from $50 Million to $1 Million, GMO Group Refuses to Pay BTC and ETH

Odaily reports that the cloud desktop service of Japanese internet giant GMO Group suffered unauthorized access, with up to 26,739 servers potentially affected. In the ransom letter, hackers demanded payment in BTC and ETH, initially asking for $50 million, then reducing the demand to $1 million, while threatening to continue conducting anomalous transactions in compromised accounts and publicly disclosing user data. GMO Group representative Masatoshi Kumagai stated that the company refused to compromise and did not pay any funds; its crypto exchange GMO Coin confirmed that no abnormal operations were found in customer accounts. The hackers subsequently published some data and threatened to update it daily. The website domain hosting the leaked information was shut down in the early morning of October 28.