A hacking group said Friday that it had managed to infiltrate the servers of Israeli car-financing company KLS Capital and steal a substantial amount of client information.
The Black Shadow group began releasing large swathes of the stolen data on Saturday, which included information on KLS customers in Israel and abroad.
Ynet has learned that the hackers also deleted a significant amount of information on the KLS servers.
The hacker group is the same one that carried out a major cyberattack against Israel's Shirbit insurance company in December, during which they demanded a ransom of no less than 200 Bitcoins, or $3.8 million, for the return of the stolen information.
The hackers on Saturday demanded that KLS pay a ransom worth NIS 1.9 million in Bitcoin (to a value of $570,000), a demand that the finance company rejected.
KLS said it had received initial assistance from the government's cyber security branch to stop the attack and the attempt to steal money from the company.
The National Cyber Security Authority said following the attack on KLS that there was a need even for small companies to have strong defenses against potential hackers.
Meanwhile, Dr. Harel Menashri, head of the Cyber department at Holon Institute of Technology and a former member of the Shin Bet domestic security service, said he believes the hackers' ransom demand was intended to mask the true purpose of the attack.
According to Menashri, the hackers' real aim was to embarrass Israeli companies by exposing their security weaknesses.
“It is completely clear that the attack was not carried out for ransom purposes as the hackers claim but other purposes are at hand," said Menashri.
"The ransom is a smoke screen just like the events at Shirbit."
i24NEWS contributed to this report