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An emerging hacking group claims to have stolen more than a terabyte of data from a West Perth-based company.
The PEAR ransomware gang has listed a West Australian IT services firm as a victim on its darknet leak site, claiming to have stolen 1.26 terabytes of data.
According to the hackers, the data includes “financials, business data, PII records, private data of your partners, vendors, and clients, mailboxes, internal and external email correspondence with all files attached, databases, etc”.
PEAR has published the data, as well as a file tree and three sample documents: a banking reconciliation report, a tax summary – including tax file number – and a summary of assets and investments. The data appears legitimate, and the most recent document is dated May 2025.
“Alt Vision top persons have refused to communicate with us,” the hackers said in a leak post dated 5 August.
“Now their data we have is available for everyone.”
Alt Vision has not responded to Cyber Daily’s requests for comment.
PEAR is a relative newcomer to the ransomware scene, posting details of its first 18 victims all on the same day, 5 August. The name stands for the group’s criminal business model – pure extraction and ransom, and the group considers itself a “community of highly responsible and strictly disciplined members”. One of the gang’s other victims was the New Zealand accounting firm TAS NZ Bay Limited.
“We are a private team and have nothing common with any other threat actors,” PEAR said on its About page.
“We’ve been monitoring this field for a long, long time. So, we understand all the processes and know well how it all works.”
Like many cyber criminals, PEAR claims to be doing its victims a favour by pointing out flaws in their network security and says it avoids encrypting files so as not to disrupt business processes. PEAR claims that any damage done to its victims is purely their fault for not having robust security in place.
The group claims to research its victims before setting a ransom price, and in a negotiation seen by Cyber Daily, one victim was asked to pay four bitcoin to have their data deleted from PEAR’s servers and their name removed from its leak site. As of the time of writing, that’s roughly $180,000.
English does not appear to be the group’s first language, though their location and nationality remain unknown.
Alt Vision is headquartered in West Perth and offers a range of IT services to government, mining, and financial entities.
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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