Paying Hacker Extortion

An anonymous reader writes "A friend works as CIO at a medium sized publicly traded company. The company was contacted by a hacking group and told to pay $100,000 to prevent their company from being hacked/attacked. They actually paid the extortion (told authorities after). The authorities said the company could be charged with supporting Terrorists. Seeing that most publicly known hacks are costing companies this size nearly a million dollars, Is this supporting terrorists or supporting stockholders?"

Comments

Re:everyone loses

[AliasMarlowe]

For $100k they could have got an internal security person for a year, or possibly a decent external consultant. Either way, hacking in would be made a bit harder in the future (but not impossible). As it is, they've set themselves up as a future victim for the next round of extortion.

Dubious?

[rueger]

Am I alone in finding this story incredibly sketchy? Either the company, the poster, and the police are stunning idiots, or it's just bullshit created to inflame a bunch of slashdotters.

If some kind of attribution can't be found, I call BS.

Sound Like a Money Laundering Scheme?

[InitZero]

So you say a mid-sized company paid a $100,000 extortion? That money with 'poof', right? Untraceable, right? Call me the suspicious sort but are we sure this is extortion and not embezzlement?

Cheers,
Matt

Re:everyone loses

[Wrath0fb0b]

Criminal, yes. The crimes in question have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, though.

Doesn't that depend on other facts that we don't have?

Re:And now

[digitig]

A former colleague who had worked in some highly corrupt countries told me that the first time he filled in an expenses claim (for a visit to a country where he couldn't even get on the flight back without bribing the check-in clerk) he put down a claim for "Bribery and corruption". The accounts department bounced it and told him to put down "Payments as understood".