Ddos 
For content creators, the unauthorized scraping of their work by AI companies for training artificial intelligence models is a profoundly unsettling violation. Now, keeping pace with the times, hackers have begun exploiting creators’ works as leverage for extortion.
The platform Artists&Clients, which connects human artists with potential clients and manages commissions, explicitly prohibits the use of AI-generated art. Yet, on August 30, the site was infiltrated by hackers.
In a threatening message, the attackers claimed that all files had been encrypted and the platform compromised. The company behind the site was ordered to pay $50,000 in Bitcoin or Monero. Only then, the hackers promised, would the data be decrypted and the stolen content deleted.
The group behind the attack, dubbed LunaLock (a name assigned by security researchers rather than the hackers themselves), is known for operating ransomware campaigns—though few expected it to target an artist-centric website.
The hackers warned that if the ransom was not paid, they would release all the artists’ works into AI training datasets, effectively allowing AI models to freely mimic the creators’ distinctive styles if the dataset proved large enough.
Since the breach on August 30, Artists&Clients has remained offline. The company has yet to issue any public statement, leaving it unclear whether they intend to pay the ransom. If proper backups exist, recovery should not be overly difficult.
Still, should the hackers make good on their threat and hand over the stolen works to AI training datasets, the artists who rely on the platform would likely find the outcome intolerable—viewing it not just as theft, but as a profound affront to their creative integrity.
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