The Teenager The FBI Can't Catch

November 4th, 2024 . Headquarters of Schneider Electric, a company with $40 billion in annual revenue . On their computers, a ransom note has just appeared . The demand, $125,000 paid in baguettes . Not Monero or Bitcoin . Not a wire transfer routed through six shell companies to an account no one can trace . Baguettes, as in bread, that long, thin kind . France is famous for them, and the note makes a point of this because Schneider Electric is headquartered in France . The attackers are also offering a discount . Publicize the breach within 48 hours, and the bread bill gets cut in half . Inside Schneider's systems, the damage is extensive . 40 GB stolen from the company's internal . 400,000 rows of user data. 75,000 unique email addresses . Sometime in the previous [music] 24 hours, someone had walked straight through the front door . Within 2 days, the story is everywhere . Cyber Scoop, The Register, Forbes, Dark Reading . Data breaches happen every single week, and almost none of them make the news . [music] But, this was different . Nobody had ever asked to be paid in [music] bread before, and that was kind of the point . Schneider makes an announcement and confirms the breach . This is their third major cyber attack in under 2 years . They've mobilized their incident response team . Their spokesperson says very little . They don't negotiate with terrorists, and they don't pay in baguettes . Somewhere in the Middle East, a teenager is watching this unfold . He's only 17 years old . He sent the demand himself, and he can't believe it's actually working . His name online is PrOx . Over the following months, he and a small group of hackers calling themselves Hellcat hit Israel's parliament , a US telecom provider, one of Spain's largest corporations , and allegedly touched systems inside the United States Department of Defense . They became the most discussed hacker group in the world