The extortion group ShinyHunters hacked the dark web leak site run by Clop, one of the most active ransomware operations in the world, defaced it with their own branding, and is now threatening to put Clop through the same extortion process Clop runs on its corporate victims.
The attack happened Friday night, September 19. ShinyHunters found an unauthenticated file upload flaw in Grav CMS, the content management system Clop was running its leak site on, and used it to push a text file directly onto the server. The file read: "THIS SITE HAS BEEN PWN3D BY SHINYHUNTERES #Skids10p – Maybe don't try to threaten us next time." It also linked back to ShinyHunters' own Tor site. The file was confirmed live and downloadable directly from Clop's server.
Hours later, ShinyHunters said they had gone further. A visit to Clop's site showed the entire page replaced with ASCII art of Umbreon, the Pokemon ShinyHunters uses as its logo, and the line "rooting your systems since '19 ;)". The same Umbreon artwork had appeared when ShinyHunters defaced HackForums back in August 2020. Clop's defaced page was still live at the time of writing.
ShinyHunters claimed full access to the server and said they took source code, Grav CMS plugins, and everything stored in the server's /var/log directory, which typically holds authentication logs, system activity records, and the IP addresses of everyone who connected to it. They also claim to have pulled the private keys for Clop's Tor onion service. Those keys are what tie a .onion address to its server. With them, ShinyHunters could host a copy of Clop's site at the exact same onion URL, on infrastructure they control. "We have their onion keys. So if they kick us out it wouldn't matter at all because we control the private keys to host the same exact onion URL," the group said.
The plan is to post an extortion message on their own site and give Clop 72 hours to respond.
The defacement and the uploaded file are independently confirmed. The claims about stolen source code, server logs, and Tor private keys come only from ShinyHunters and have not been independently verified. Clop has not commented.
The dispute behind this attack goes back about a year. In August 2025, Clop quietly began exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite, tracked as CVE-2025-61882, a server-side request forgery flaw that gave attackers remote access to enterprise systems without authentication. Oracle did not patch it until October 2025, after Mandiant confirmed active exploitation. By then, Clop had already sent mass extortion emails to executives at dozens of companies, including Cox Enterprises, The Washington Post, Logitech, Michelin, and Estee Lauder.
ShinyHunters says that exploit was originally theirs and that Clop used it without authorization. In October 2025, ShinyHunters, operating under the name "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters," leaked the proof-of-concept publicly. Oracle confirmed it matched the exploit used in the Clop attacks. ShinyHunters said the leak was deliberate, intended to disrupt Clop's campaign and expose what had been taken from them.
What followed, according to ShinyHunters, was a direct threat from a Clop representative. "During the Oracle EBS campaign they ran and stole from me last year, someone from cl0p personally messaged me and said, and I quote (translated from Russian): I have more money than you and all of your people combined, I'll kill you soon," the group said. Those allegations have not been independently verified.
This is not the first time criminal groups have turned on each other. In March 2025, DragonForce defaced the leak sites of rival operations BlackLock and Mamona. Later in 2026, two groups called 0APT and KryBit hacked and leaked each other's operational data until both were left severely damaged. The difference in the Clop case is the scale of the target. Clop's leak site is the operational center of its entire extortion model, the platform it uses to name victims and apply public pressure when ransoms go unpaid. Losing control of it, and potentially the keys that anchor its onion address, is not a minor disruption.
ShinyHunters' own Tor site went offline shortly after the attack. No connection to Clop has been established.
Read the original article: