Hackers Demand $25 Million from Ozempic Maker for Stolen Data. Novo Nordisk Refused to Pay

Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, maker of the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, admitted on Thursday that attackers had breached its internal IT systems and copied non-public data, including patient data from some clinical trials. The company claims its core operations continue to run and that the stolen records cannot be directly linked to specific names. However, the Danish tech press describes an incident that, according to its reporting, has affected the company's development environment since mid-May — a dimension that has so far received little attention in Slovak and Czech wire-service coverage.

Update: ransom demand revealed — $25 million for 1.3 TB

Six days after admitting the breach, it emerged what the attackers had demanded. The extortion group FulcrumSec claimed responsibility for the incident, saying it had taken approximately 1.3 terabytes of data from Novo Nordisk and was demanding $25 million (roughly €21.5 million) to keep it secret. According to the group, the company refused to pay. Spiegel ↗ El País ↗

The group claims it moved through the company's networks for more than two months, gaining initial access via a GitHub login token it had found back in March. Among the stolen data, it claims, are source code, internal documents, information on marketed and upcoming drugs — including the "formulas" for Ozempic and the experimental obesity drug amycretin —, clinical trial data, records on employees, doctors and patients, information on manufacturing plants, and materials related to internal artificial intelligence models. The Next Web ↗

After the ransom was refused, the group announced it was "exploring a private sale" of part of the data. It should be stressed that, for now, both the scope and the categories of stolen data rest mainly on the attackers' own statements — Novo Nordisk has not independently confirmed the 1.3 TB volume or the specific categories.

What Novo has admitted — and what it hasn't

In its official statement, Novo Nordisk says there was "unauthorized access to a limited number of internal IT systems" and that "certain non-public data, including personal data, was copied externally without authorization." Novo Nordisk ↗

According to Reuters, the affected categories include patient identification number, year of birth, sex, and health data including immunogenicity data. The company stresses that the information "is not directly linked to patient names or other direct identifiers" and that the incident does not enable a third party to identify trial participants without additional data that was not leaked. Reuters ↗

The company preemptively disconnected part of its systems and is gradually bringing them back online in a controlled manner; it has launched an investigation with external experts and contacted the authorities. "Protecting the security and integrity of our systems, and the reliable supply of products to patients, remain our top priority," the company states. Novo Nordisk ↗ Public broadcaster DR reported the same conclusion: according to the company, its core operations were not affected. DR ↗

What Danish media already knew

The official admission, however, puts a name to something the Danish trade press has been documenting for weeks. As early as June 4, the outlets Version2 and Ingeniøren — based on internal documents and screenshots — reported that on May 11 Novo had hastily cut off employee access to the developer tools GitHub and Azure DevOps and was rebuilding its internal development environment "from scratch." Version2 ↗ Ingeniøren ↗

According to these outlets, software development at the company effectively ground to a halt for several weeks. It is precisely this dimension — weeks of crippled development and a complete rebuild of the environment — that has remained in the background of the wire-service dispatch picked up by Slovak and Czech websites.

A trail leading to a supply-chain attack — so far unconfirmed

Danish experts pointed to a striking coincidence in timing: the shutdown of tools at Novo Nordisk coincides with a global wave of software supply-chain attacks. According to security firm Tenable, the self-replicating worm from the Shai-Hulud campaign run by the TeamPCP group has, since September 2025, gradually infected more than 170 packages in the npm and PyPI ecosystems; its current version, Mini Shai-Hulud, has also broken through strict code-provenance verification and has hit companies including OpenAI and Mistral AI. Tenable ↗

One Danish expert described it as a suspicious coincidence that the attack also affected a Novo Nordisk partner, OpenAI. Version2 ↗ However, Novo Nordisk has not confirmed any direct causal link and has made no official statement on the origin of the attack. The claim therefore remains at the level of a timing coincidence, not a proven connection.

Why this matters to Slovak and Czech readers too

Novo Nordisk is no ordinary company — its drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are among the best-known and best-selling in the world, and they are also widely discussed here. A leak of clinical trial data is sensitive because it involves health information protected under the European GDPR regulation; according to analysts, it will be crucial whether data protection authorities open a formal investigation and whether the incident results in fines. Yahoo Finance ↗

The case is a reminder of just how dependent even top-tier European companies are on American developer platforms such as GitHub and Azure DevOps (both owned by Microsoft) — and how quickly a compromised open-source package can spill over into corporate development environments across industries. Novo Nordisk shares, which have lost more than 40 percent of their value over the past year, face further pressure on investor confidence. Yahoo Finance ↗

What hotinfo is watching

• Whether the Danish data protection authority (Datatilsynet) opens a formal investigation into the clinical trial data leak.
• Whether Novo Nordisk or investigators confirm or refute a connection to the Shai-Hulud wave.
• When the company will fully restore its development environment, and what impact the weeks of restricted development will have.
• Whether further European victims of the same campaign emerge.
• Whether FulcrumSec, after the ransom refusal, actually publishes or sells the stolen data — and whether its scope and content are independently confirmed.