It's never a good sign when a developer stumbles across a digital ransom note.
However, that appears to be what happened at The Sacramento Bee, the newspaper and digital publication for California's capitol.
"The Bee learned of the incident... when a developer noticed that a database would not upload correctly to a server maintained by a third-party hosting service. The developer then discovered a note from a cybercriminal demanding a Bitcoin ransom in exchange for the data.
The information was compromised last month after The Bee’s vendor performed routine maintenance and the firewall did not come back online. With the firewall down, The Bee’s database was exposed to the public internet for about two weeks."
The paper says it did not pay the ransom and deleted the encrypted databases to "prevent further attacks."