alt Hacker NewsLOL that's some super heavy duty optics framing on what basically amounts to "we paid out a ransom but don't worry the bad guys assured us things were okay"
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I thought it was illegal to pay ransom to hackers. I guess it is legal or maybe it isn't very clear? I thought that there were certain conditions that the company had to check together with law enforcement so that at least the ransom money doesn't go to a hacker group that is on a government payments sanctions list.
Also, does anyone know the root cause of the attack? I read a rumor online (but it's not really confirmed anywhere) that it may have had to do with the common pattern of ShinyHunters where they use a vulnerability in a Salesforce Experience Cloud site. What is confirmed for sure is that the vulnterability involved the feature of Canvas called "Free-For-Teacher accounts".
If the bad guys get paid and release the info anyway, they not only make it less likely they'll get paid in the future, they make it less likely anyone will get paid in the future.
Even other bad guys have an incentive to stop these bad guys from leaking the info after getting paid.
They said “received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)” - is this supposed to fool users into thinking the hackers didn’t keep any of the data?