Mazhar Farooqui reported this on Nov. 25:
A sinister cyber criminal has hacked into a Sharjah bank and is now holding it to ransom by leaking confidential data of clients on social networking and microblogging site Twitter every few hours, XPRESS can reveal.
The criminal who goes by the moniker Hacker Buba and uses a stolen picture of a bank staff says he will not stop until the bank pays him an undisclosed amount of ransom money in the digital currency Bitcoin (explained below) by this weekend.
True to his word, he has been posting the account statements of government entities and scores of UAE firms and individuals daily since November 18.
Read more on Gulf News. The bank did not pay the ransom demand, and the hacker did dump a lot of customers’ data. Those files, linked to from tweets, appear to be 404 today.
“Hacker Buba’s” twitter handle was @hacked_invest. On Nov. 18, he tweeted:
#hacked #investbank … Sell private #sql from #database: clients, all financial info, #creditcard and etc … all ~900 gigs
and
Sell #3des keys from #investbank
XPRESS did not name the bank in their Nov. 25th report, but from the hacker’s tweets, it would appear he claimed to have hacked InvestBank, one of the largest banks in Sharjah.