Nude pictures never go unnoticed, and when these belong to celebrities and the mighty Royals, then people are bound to go crazy. This perhaps was in the mind of The Dark Overlord hacker group when they decided to invade the privacy of a well-known London-based celebrity plastic surgery clinic London Bridge Plastic Surgery (LBPS).
The group is associated with various high profile hacks including compromising of schools and medical facilities in the US and attack on Netflix where the group leaked unaired episodes of some of the shows. This time around it has managed to steal extremely sensitive, graphic pictures of UK celebs and royals.
It can easily be termed as a very sensitive of all data breaches we have heard of so far since hackers claim that they possess pictures of in-progress breast enhancement and male/female genitalia treatments. Moreover, The Dark Overlord stated that they have pictures of post-operation bodies with faces evident in some pictures and close-ups from pre and post operation. Now the group is threatening to release the pictures if the clinic does not fulfill their demands.
“We have TBs [terabytes] of this shit. Databases, names, everything. There are some royal families in here. We’re going to pitch it all up for everyone to nab. The entire patient list with corresponding photos. The world has never seen a medical dump of a plastic surgeon to such degree,” The Dark Overlord stated.
The clinic has also confirmed the data breach and released an official statement explaining that the cyber-attack was blocked “immediately” to safeguard patient information while the Metropolitan Police was notified. The police have already launched an investigation. Furthermore, LBPS stated that the data breach is quite “horrific” since hackers have sensitive data of their patients while the source of hack is yet to be determined.
It is also not clear how much ransom The Dark Overlord has demanded, but it is clear that a member of the group sent an email to The Daily Beast using an email account of the LBPS informing about the hack attack with a cache of pictures. When the photos were searched on Google, none returned any matches depicting that the images were indeed the property of a private source. The public relations firm of LBPS, Marco Richards, was contacted to get further information on the hack attack and ransom demand, but the company didn’t respond or released any statement as yet.
We have seldom heard about plastic surgery clinics being targeted by malicious cyber-criminals. So far this is the second such attack; earlier this year the Lithuanian Grozio Chirurgija (LGC) clinic became a victim of a targeted data breach, and around 25,000 images were stolen and leaked online. LGC has patients in the UK, Germany, and Denmark, which were targeted separately by the hackers for ransom. In this case, the hacker group involved is speculated to be the Tsar Team.
[q]Graphic Images of Celebs and Royals Stolen after Hacking of Famous Plastic Surgery Clinic[/q]
LBPS is undoubtedly in big trouble if the sensitive images are leaked online. The database, which comprises of medical records and personally identifiable information of its high profile patients, can be used to blackmail the patients as well as to perform identity theft.
This is not the first time when a plastic surgery related institution has been targeted by hackers. In May this year, the Kaunas Lithuania-based Grozio Chirurgija clinics were had their client data stolen and leaked online.
More details on Dark Over Lord’s previous hacks are available here.
