A ransomware gang known as Beast claimed responsibility for an attack on the Methodist Church of South Africa and threatened to leak 150 GB of stolen data online. Proof of the breach included extracts from the church’s 2015‑2019 annual financial statements posted on Beast’s dark‑web leak site, revealing phone numbers, emails, and physical addresses of church officials and auditors. According to threat‑intelligence firm SOCRadar, Beast Ransomware is the evolved form of the earlier Monster strain, first detected in March 2022 during an investigation by the BlackBerry Incident Response team.