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Charter confirms data breach after ShinyHunters extortion threat

Recorded: May 26, 2026, 8 p.m.

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Charter confirms data breach after ShinyHunters extortion threat

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HomeNewsSecurityCharter confirms data breach after ShinyHunters extortion threat

Charter confirms data breach after ShinyHunters extortion threat

By Lawrence Abrams

May 26, 2026
03:46 PM
0

U.S. telecommunications giant Charter Communications has confirmed it suffered a data breach after the ShinyHunters extortion group threatened to leak stolen data unless a ransom is paid.
Charter Communications is one of the largest broadband providers in the United States, serving tens of millions of residential and business customers through its Spectrum brand.
In a statement shared this weekend, the company said it is alerting authorities about the incident and that no sensitive personal customer information was stolen.
"We are aware of the situation, following our security protocols and are in the process of alerting appropriate authorities," Charter told BleepingComputer.
"No sensitive personal information (PI) or customer proprietary network information (CPNI) data was exfiltrated by the threat actor as a result of recent activity."
ShinyHunters extorting Charter
This statement follows Charter's listing on the ShinyHunters data leak site, where attackers claimed to have stolen 40 million records containing the personal information of consumer and business customers.
 

Charter listing on the ShinyHunters data leak site
ShinyHunters claimed to BleepingComputer that they breached Charter on April 1 through a voice phishing (vishing) attack that compromised an employee's Microsoft Entra account.
The threat actors used this access to export millions of consumer and business customer records from the company's Salesforce instance.
According to the threat actor, the stolen records contain customer names, email addresses, addresses, phone numbers, phone type, plan information, and some CPNI data. The threat actor also claims to have stolen customer support ticket data.
BleepingComputer contacted Charter again about the threat actor's claims that additional customer data, including some CPNI, was stolen but was referred back to the company's original statement.
Since last year, the extortion group has been conducting widespread social engineering campaigns that target employees and BPO agents' Microsoft Entra, Okta, and Google SSO accounts.
After gaining access to a corporate SSO account, the threat actors steal data from connected SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, SAP, Slack, Adobe, Atlassian, Zendesk, Dropbox, and many others.
This stolen data is then used to extort the company by threatening to leak the data if a ransom is not paid.
Salesforce has been a popular target of the extortion gang, with the threat actors breaching numerous integration companies to steal OAuth tokens that can then be used to access Salesforce instances.
More recently, ShinyHunters conducted multiple attacks against the education technology firm Instructure, resulting in Canvas outages and the theft of data from tens of millions of students.
Instructure said it ultimately reached an "agreement" with the extortion gang, meaning it likely paid a ransom to prevent the public release of the stolen data.

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Related Articles:
7-Eleven confirms data breach claimed by the ShinyHunters gang7-Eleven data breach exposes personal information of 185,000 peopleInstructure reaches 'agreement' with ShinyHunters to stop data leakHome security giant ADT data breach affects 5.5 million peopleInstructure hacker claims data theft from 8,800 schools, universities

Charter Communications
Data Breach
Extortion
Salesforce
ShinyHunters

Lawrence Abrams
Lawrence Abrams is the owner and Editor in Chief of BleepingComputer.com. Lawrence's area of expertise includes Windows, malware removal, and computer forensics. Lawrence Abrams is a co-author of the Winternals Defragmentation, Recovery, and Administration Field Guide and the technical editor for Rootkits for Dummies.

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Charter Communications confirmed a data breach following an extortion threat made by the ShinyHunters group. Charter, one of the largest broadband providers in the United States serving tens of millions of residential and business customers through its Spectrum brand, alerted authorities regarding the incident. The company explicitly stated that no sensitive personal information or customer proprietary network information was exfiltrated by the threat actors as a result of the recent activity.

This confirmation followed Charter's listing on the ShinyHunters data leak site, where the attackers claimed to have stolen forty million records containing various personal information for consumer and business customers. The threat actors contended that the initial breach occurred on April 1 through a voice phishing, or vishing, attack that successfully compromised an employee's Microsoft Entra account. The threat actors subsequently utilized this compromised access to export millions of consumer and business customer records from the company's Salesforce instance, including names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, plan details, and some proprietary network information. The threat actors also claimed to have stolen customer support ticket data.

The extortion group is known to conduct extensive social engineering campaigns targeting the Microsoft Entra, Okta, and Google Single Sign-On (SSO) accounts of employees and business process outsourcing agents. By gaining access to these corporate SSO accounts, the threat actors are able to systematically extract data from numerous connected Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, including Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, SAP, Slack, Adobe, Atlassian, Zendesk, and others.

Salesforce proved to be a particularly popular target for the extortion gang. The threat actors reportedly breached numerous integration companies to steal OAuth tokens, which they could then leverage to access various Salesforce instances. Furthermore, the ShinyHunters group conducted attacks against the education technology firm Instructure, which resulted in Canvas outages and the theft of data belonging to tens of millions of students. Instructure eventually reached an agreement with the extortion group, suggesting they likely paid a ransom to prevent the public release of the stolen data.