Open source tool maker Grafana Labs says hackers stole its code, refuses to pay ransom
Grafana Labs confirmed a hacking incident but chose not to pay the ransom demanded by the attackers. The hackers accessed the company's GitLab environment using a stolen token, allowing them to obtain source code repositories. Grafana emphasized that no customer data was compromised and has implemented additional security measures following the breach.
- ▪Grafana Labs was hacked, but the company refused to pay the ransom demanded by the attackers.
- ▪The hackers accessed the company's GitLab environment using a stolen token credential.
- ▪No customer records or financial data were compromised in the incident.
TechCrunch files mainly under tech. We currently carry 593 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/18/open-source-tool-maker-grafana-labs-says-hackers-stole-its-code-refuses-to-pay-ransom/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 13:42:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T13:44:56.488Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T14:01:09.171Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GQVgSYwEIMXU |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Grafana Labs, the maker of its eponymous popular open source web visualization software, confirmed it had been hacked but that it refused to pay the hackers who had threatened to release the company’s codebase. In a series of posts on social media, the lab said its investigation found that the hackers had abused a stolen token credential that allowed access to the company’s GitLab environment, which it uses for code development. The token did not provide access to customer records or financial data, but allowed the hackers to obtain the company’s repositories of source code. The company has since invalidated the token and added additional security measures to prevent a repeat incident.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from TechCrunch
