In a story that is stranger than fiction, the Russian hacking group REvil announced that they’ve successfully hacked into Kenneth Copeland Ministries and have stolen 1.2 terabytes of “sensitive data.” As a result, they are threatening to release it to the public if the televangelist doesn’t pay their ransom.
Copeland, 83, the arch-heretic who has a net worth of somewhere between 500-700 million dollars, was last seen demonically laughing at the media who were claiming Biden won the election, unsettling news given that he had prophecied already that Trump would take the win.
After their ill-gotten gain, the ransomware group sent out a “press release” on the dark web, bragging that they’ve taken over and encrypted the servers at the Texas-based Kenneth Copeland Ministries and had acquired “financial documents, contracts, bank documents, sales history, [and] emails.” This act leaves the ministry completely locked out and at the mercy of the predatory hackers.
According to CSOOnline,
REvil is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation that has extorted large amounts of money from organizations worldwide over the past year. Its name stands for Ransomware Evil and was inspired by the Resident Evil movie series. According to recent reports from security firms, it is the most widespread ransomware threat and the group behind it doubles down on its extortion efforts by also stealing business data and threatening to release it.
We don’t know at this point how much money REvil is asking for, but given that the statement has been since taken down after it went up on Wednesday, and Copeland is pretty much the richest televangelist in the world, it is assumed that they are in active negotiations, and it will be settled soon.
