- Akira ransomware claims to have breached OpenOffice and stolen 23GB of sensitive corporate data
- Apache denies breach, citing OpenOffice’s open source nature and lack of employee or private data
- No ransom demand received; investigation launched, but no police notified due to lack of evidence
The Akira ransomware group recently added OpenOffice to its list of breached organizations and said that it would soon release dozens of gigabytes of stolen “corporate files”.
However the Apache Software Foundation, the organization behind the open source office software suite, hinted at a major misunderstanding on Akira’s side, since such a breach did not, and basically could not have happened, on its systems.
Akira said it would be announcing a data leak soon: “We will upload 23gb of corporate documents soon. Employee information (addresses, phones, DOB, driver licenses, social security cards, credit cards information and so on), financial information, internal confidential files, lots of reports about their problems with the application and so on.”
investigating the claims
But OpenOffice basically doesn’t know what Akira is talking about.
“The Apache Software Foundation takes security of our projects’ software very seriously, and we are currently investigating this claim,” it told BleepingComputer. “There has been no reported ransom demand to the Foundation or the Apache OpenOffice project at this time.”
Then it explained why this announcement made very little sense: “Since Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation, so we don’t even possess the set of data described in the claim.”
“Therefore, we do not believe this claim is directed at the ASF’s or Apache OpenOffice project’s infrastructure itself. And, because OpenOffice is developed in an open and transparent manner on our developer mailing lists, all concerns about bugs and feature requests are already public.”
Since it found no evidence of a breach, it did not notify the police, or do anything besides launch an in-house investigation.
OpenOffice is a free and open source office suite, similar to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other related tools, and its files are compatible with those of major productivity suites.
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