ShinyHunters
Motivation
Financially motivated — data theft & extortion
First seen
2020
Also known as
Actor IOCs (31)
ShinyHunters is a financially motivated data-theft and extortion collective that rose to prominence in 2020 by breaching dozens of companies and selling stolen databases on underground forums such as RaidForums and, later, BreachForums. Rather than encrypting victims, the group specializes in mass data exfiltration followed by public extortion via its own data-leak site. Google's Threat Intelligence Group tracks the financially motivated cluster behind the current wave as UNC6240, with related vishing and SaaS-theft activity attributed to clusters UNC6661 and UNC6671. Recent operations have pivoted from bulk database dumps toward targeted social engineering — help-desk vishing, victim-branded SSO/Okta phishing pages, and OAuth/connected-app abuse — to plunder SaaS platforms like Salesforce, SharePoint, DocuSign and Google Workspace before extortion.