10GB of Nestlé data leaked, say Anonymous

The hacktivist group has apparently made good on its threat to go after major companies that it says have not pulled out of Russia – with claims to have leaked a trove of data belonging to food giant Nestlé.

“Nestlé, as the death toll climbs, you have been warned and now breached,” it said in its original post on Twitter. If the hacktivist collective’s follow-up post today is to be believed, it wasn’t lying.

“The Anonymous collective has leaked the database of the largest food company in the world, Nestlé,” the group declared. It further clarified that the shared data consisted of 10GB worth of emails, passwords, and client data.

Cybernews reporters investigated the files containing the leaked information – listed on Telegram as Nestle Orders.txt, Nestle partial 1.txt, Nestle Passwords.txt, and Nestle Payments.txt – and found that the data sample released by Anonymous weighed in at 5.7MB, a fraction of the total data load if the group's claims are true.

Furthermore, at time of writing Cybernews could not confirm whether the leaked data is original or in fact from previous breaches – an issue in the cyberwar that has been highlighted by other observers.

Anonymous had placed the Swiss food and drink multinational at or close to the top of its list of what it sees as pariah firms – including Burger King, Subway and CitiGroup – that it says have done too little to cut ties with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

This particular data breach is being claimed by grey-hat hacker group Kelvin Security – which normally offers to fix exploits for a fee and is now thought to have affiliated itself to Anonymous.