- Akira ransomware claims to have breached OpenOffice and stolen 23 GB of sensitive corporate data
- Apache denies the breach, citing OpenOffice’s open source nature and lack of employee or private data
- No ransom demand received; investigation launched but no police were notified due to lack of evidence
The Akira ransomware group recently added OpenOffice to its list of breached organizations and said it would soon release tens of gigabytes of stolen “corporate” files.
However, the Apache Software Foundation, the organization behind the open source office software suite, suggested a major misunderstanding on Akira’s part, since such a breach did not happen, and basically could not have happened, on its systems.
Akira said it will soon announce a data leak: “We will soon upload 23gb of company documents. Employee information (addresses, phones, DOB, driver’s license, social security card, credit card information and so on), financial information, internal confidential files, lots of reports about their problems with the application and so on.”
investigates the allegations
But OpenOffice basically doesn’t know what Akira is talking about.
“The Apache Software Foundation takes the security of our projects’ software very seriously, and we are currently investigating this allegation,” it said. Bleeping Computer. “No ransom demands have been reported for the Foundation or the Apache OpenOffice project at this time.”
It then explained why this announcement made very little sense: “As Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees of the project or foundation, so we do not even possess the set of data described in the claim.”
“Therefore, we do not believe that this claim is directed against ASF or the Apache OpenOffice project infrastructure itself. And because OpenOffice is developed in an open and transparent manner on our developer mailing lists, any concerns about bugs and feature requests are already public.”
Finding no evidence of a breach, it did not notify the police or do anything other than launch an internal investigation.
OpenOffice is a free and open source office suite similar to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and other related tools, and its files are compatible with the major productivity suites.
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