Anonymous claimed it hacked Nestlé - but food giant says it accidentally leaked data itself

Nestlé has denied that the hacking collective Anonymous published sensitive information they stole from the company – because Nestle had already leaked it themselves.

Anonymous had claimed that it released 10GB of data from Nestlé due to the company’s continuing business in Russia during its invasion of Ukraine.

However, Nestlé now claims that the “claim of a cyber-attack against Nestlé and subsequent data leak has no foundation.”

This is because the data shared “relates to a case from February, when some randomized and predominantly publicly available test data of a B2B nature was made accessible unintentionally online for a short period of time on a single business test website”, a spokesperson told The Independent.

This information includes publicly-available data such as company names and company addresses, business email addresses, that was erroneously made available on the web. Nestle says it “quickly investigated and no further action was deemed necessary.”

An investigation by the website Cybernews also suggests that Anonymous only released 5.7MB of data and could not confirm whether the leaked data was original or from previous breaches.

Nestle has said that it has suspended all capital investment in Russia but would continue operating in the country to sell “essential” products.

“We have significantly scaled back our activities in Russia: we have stopped all imports and exports from Russia, except for essential products.

“The fact that we, like other food companies, supply the population with important food does not mean that we simply continue as before.”

However, the food giant was criticised by Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, who said that it had “no understanding” of the situation and that “paying taxes to the budget of a terrorist country means killing defenseless [sic] children & mothers.”