The Hunters International ransomware group claimed in September 2024 that it had breached the London branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and taken 6.6 terabytes of data comprising more than 5.2 million files. The gang posted the claim on its leak site and set a deadline of September 13, 2024, threatening to publish everything if a ransom went unpaid.
ICBC is the world's largest bank by assets, holding roughly $6.3 trillion as of mid-2024 against annual revenue of about $113 billion. The bank did not respond to press enquiries about the claim, and neither the contents of the data set nor the method of intrusion was independently verified.
Hunters International emerged in late 2023, after the disruption of the Hive ransomware operation, and runs a ransomware-as-a-service model. The Register reported that the group had listed more than 134 victims over the course of 2024 and that it avoided targets in Russia.
As of the mid-September 2024 reporting, the account rested entirely on the attackers' own statements. ICBC had made no public acknowledgement of a breach at its London operation, and no stolen material had been confirmed as published. Banks are frequent extortion targets because of the sensitivity of the customer and counterparty records they hold.