Barely a couple of hours after David Munro, Chief Executive at Liberty Group, held a media briefing and answered questions relating to the breach of their IT infrastructure, a person/s claiming to have been responsible for the breach have made a public statement. The statement, posted publicly and seen by iAfrikan, also states that the hackers will release samples of the 40TB of data they claim to hold daily, until Liberty pays the ransom.

"Hello world, Welcome to Stage 1 of Liberty Holding Breach

After few funny days around "Liberty Holdings" breach, now its time to show some interesting data:

[LINK OF FOLDER REDACTED] Enjoy, this is only the sample given to Liberty management as proof for sensitive data. We still holding 40TB that will be published as few parts, every day. Database file includes customers data, finance data, few full email backup of their directors and more interesting data. 'Liberty customers have not suffered financial losses due to cyber attack' - For only one reason, we did not do that for harming your customers, our goal was to improve your security. You made your choice to, time to pay!" reads the statement.

The folder, which iAfrikan has seen, is currently publicly available and contains no files or data.

Munro, along with an official statement issued by Liberty, had earlier on 17 June 2018 stated that "only e-mails and attachments" were accessed by the hackers, but based on the statement by the hackers, it appears there is much more to it.

Update

19 June 2018 - Responding to an iAfrikan tweet about concerns around the Liberty Holdings security breach, Standard Bank South Africa said it had advised its customers to take precautions "following an illegal access into our infrastructure by an external party who took data and demanded a ransom for it." It's not clear, and Standard Bank have not responded to any communication from iAfrikan for over 10 hours, whether this is confirmation that the bank was hacked or whether the tweet was made as a mistake by someone also responsible for the Liberty twitter account. The bank has since deleted the tweet.

18 June 2018 - A group claiming to be the alleged Liberty Group hackers have deleted the message they had posted online.

17 June 2018 - South Africa's Liberty Group's IT systems have been breached and David Munro, CEO, says they learned of the breach on Thursday, 14 June 2018. Link

16 June 2018 - South Africa's Liberty Group has suffered a systems and data breach. Link

Cover image credit: David Munro, Chief Executive at Liberty Group, briefing the media on 17 June 2018.