Not that this isn’t scummy but my understanding is that “ransomware” refers to software that locks a user or organization out of their systems until a fee is paid, generally my encrypting the disk.
This seems like a more traditional “hack” of a system where you get in and download data. Which makes threatening them is traditional blackmail.
The point is that Alphv is an operator of ransomware as a service (RaaS), specifically BlackCat, independent of whether they used ransomware in this specific attack (which it indeed doesn’t sound like).