“It was a joke”: CrowdStrike data leak was fake

CrowdStrike has denied allegations of a data leak. A hacker named “Rey” recently claimed in a well-known hacker forum that he had penetrated the company’s systems and stolen employee data. Now the cybercriminal is also admitting to the forgery.

“Today I’m presenting you with a dataset of CrowdStrike employee data just to annoy them,” the hacker wrote in the forum. He cited CrowdStrike’s “aggressive stance and involvement in high-profile cybercrime investigations” as the motivation for the alleged attack. In particular, he mentioned the company’s assistance in the arrest of the notorious hacker “USDoD”. The hacker Rey and his accomplice grep are core operators of the ransomware group HellCat.

Data from public sources

However, CrowdStrike confirmed to the security portal Cyber Daily that the alleged leak was a fake. “The published information was gathered from publicly available sources. The accuracy of the data indicates that it is not current, and there is no evidence of a security incident at CrowdStrike,” the company explained. In the meantime, the hacker “Rey” has also admitted in a post on the X platform that the leak was fake and tagged the cybersecurity company in a post: “It was a joke”, he wrote succinctly.