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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?"
Criminal, yes. The crimes in question have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, though.
Dane-geld
(A.D. 980-1016)
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:—
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:—
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:—
“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
"Are they made from real Girl Scouts?" ~Wednesday Addams
Or, more likely, they paid the 100,000 with the hopes that the hacker would be caught, then paid IBM 1 million dollars to secure their network.
IBM then pays an external contractor 200,000 to do it. They pay the hacker $100,000 to do it. Hacker walks away with 200k and a springboard to legitimate work.
The ______ Agenda
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
This is utter BS. I bet it was the execs themselves who stole the money, probably long before they were "contacted by hackers". If it looks and smells like The Big Lebowski...
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".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Quit diluting the meaning of the word "terror." Terror is fearing you might be blown into bloody pieces while standing in line at a sandwich shop. Terror is fearing your elementary school kid will die a fiery death in an exploding school bus. Terror is wondering whether the building you work in is going to be on the receiving end of a trans-continental jet liner moving 500 MPH. These things are terrifying.
We already have words for the sort of thing the article is talking about: extortion, blackmail, etc.
> Trillions for defense, not a penny in tribute is the only
> long term strategy for dealing with aggression.
Sounds great, but there are always details.
In the case of the US, we wanted to get rid of a Bear, so we spent billions raising bees. The Bear grudgingly backed off, so we started trying to drive the bees away, and they attacked us. So now we spend trillions on cruise missiles to get the bees, we strip-search each other for signs of honey, and we look over our shoulder for aggressive Pandas.
Maybe there's another way.