Anime streaming platform Crunchyroll has confirmed that some customer information was stolen by a hacker earlier this month.
On Mar. 19, a hacker contacted the outlets BleepingComputer and International Cyber Digest and claimed that they’d breached the account of an employee (on Mar. 12) who works for one of Crunchyroll’s vendors in India.
The hacker allegedly infected the employee’s device with malware, gaining access to Crunchyroll support tickets and stealing roughly 100 gigabytes of data.
According to BleepingComputer, the hacker claimed to have obtained information belonging to 6.8 million users and demanded $5 million from Crunchyroll to prevent the data from being leaked. The company did not respond to the demand.
In a statement to Recorded Future News, Crunchyroll confirmed the incident, writing, “At this time, we believe that the information is primarily limited to customer service ticket data following an incident with a third-party vendor. We have not identified evidence of ongoing access to systems in relation to these claims.”A subsidiary of Sony, Crunchyroll has 17 million paying subscribers and 120 million registered users in numerous countries.
Crunchyroll’s confirmation of the incident comes at the same time that it announced more than 40 new anime programs to hit the streaming service this spring. New anime like Daemons of the Shadow Realm and Mistress Kanan is Devilishly Easy, along with new seasons of shows like Rent-A-Girlfriend and Wistoria: Wand and Sword will arrive this April.
More shows could possibly be revealed too, per the announcement.
