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

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: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".