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Everest ransomware gang claims Coca-Cola hack, but the actual victim is Middle East bottling partner, as a second hacker claims breach of European bottling partner.
Hackers have claimed a pair of breaches of major Coca-Cola bottling partners that have compromised hundreds of employees and millions of internal records.
The Everest ransomware gang claimed to have hacked the Coca-Cola Company itself in a May 22 post to its darknet leak site, stating that it had the records of 959 employees, including personal data, and “internal and confidential information”.
Included in the post were details that suggested that Coca-Cola was not in fact the victim, but rather Middle Eastern bottling partner, the Coca Cola Al Ahlia Beverages Company, headquartered in Dubai, and which trades publicly as Gulf Coca Cola Beverages. Multiple members of the Emirati royal family are major shareholders in the company’s parent organisation, the Al-Ahlia Group.
Included in the leak post were employee details, passport scans that appear to belong to a pair of minors related to a senior executive in the company, and other corporate data.
When contacted by Cyber Daily, The Coca-Cola Company did not provide a statement, but it is understood that the Everest attack has not compromised the company at all.
The Coca Cola Al Ahlia Beverages Company has not responded to Cyber Daily’s request for comment.
At the same time, a threat actor known as Gehenna has claimed a similar hack, this time Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. Rather than a ransomware attack, this appears to be a straight-up data breach, with the hacker posting details of the breach to a hacking forum and selling the data to the highest bidder.
“Today, we are selling the Salesforce database of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners,” Gehenna said in their post.
“We are the same group responsible for the recent breaches of Samsung Germany and Royal Mail”.
According to the forum post, this breach compromised 23 million records from the company’s Salesforce database dating back to 2016, including 7.5 million Salesforce accounts, 9.5 million customer service cases, 6 million contact entries, and 400,000 product records. The total size of the data is just over 63 gigabytes.
Gehenna also claimed to “have more where that came from”.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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