Last week, hacker group REvil announced that it had breached servers at the high-end mega-law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks and collected “dirt” on a number of A-list celebrities, including Donald Trump, and would hold the dirt for a $42 million ransom.
“The next person we’ll be publishing is Donald Trump … We found a ton of dirty laundry,” the group said in a “release” last week.
Now, the group claims the Donald Trump “dirt,” at least, is off the table after an “interested party” shelled out millions for the information, and they’ve shifted to selling information about pop star Madonna.
“[O]n Monday, REvil revealed the Trump documents were off the market, stating, ‘Interested people contacted us and agreed to buy all the data about the US president … We are pleased with the deal and keep our word,'” the New York Post reported. “They added, ‘We are preparing to auction Madonna data … The buyer has the right to do whatever he sees fit with the data.'”
“Interested people contacted us and agreed to buy all the data about the U.S. President, which we have accumulated over the entire time of our activity,” the group added on a dark web forum.
If a buyer paid for information on Trump — the group has offered no proof of any deal — they may be disappointed to learn that the “dirt” is likely just several dozen “snarky” references to the president in firm emails, not any contracts to which Trump was a party or any information on deals Trump struck before he won the White House. The current president was never a client of Grubman Shire, which serves mostly entertainment figures.
One cybersecurity expert told the Post that REvil “were almost certainly bluffing about it being “presidency-ending material.”
Forbes reported that a handful of emails from the “treasure trove,” released on the dark web, appeared to be the results of an internal search, on the server, for the word “Trump.” The trove included the word “trump being used as a verb and messages referring to Trump in the third-person.”
There’s also the matter of claiming to hold material on a sitting president — something that could be considered “terrorism” according to cybersecurity experts who spoke with the Post — and could trigger the involvement of the Secret Service or other Federal investigative agencies, like the FBI or CIA. Although there is likely a large market for “dirt” on Donald Trump, anyone who purchases the information from REvil would, themselves, be subject to terrorism investigation and, potentially, charges.
Buying and selling information on celebrities might be illegal (or, at least, unethical), but it’s unlikely a ransom for information on Madonna will attract the level of law enforcement interest a ransom for information on a sitting president would.
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