Millions of shoppers around North America are already clicking, swiping, and signing their way to Black Friday bargains.
And although hackers rarely offer discounts, they did this fall when they were asked to discount the ransom demand by 55%.
A Canadian municipality in Quebec demanded a lower ransom payment if hackers wanted to receive any payment at all.
The Star reports:
In order to regain access to its data, the regional municipality of Mekinac was told to deposit eight units of the digital currency Bitcoin into a bank account—roughly equivalent to $65,000.
Mekinac’s IT department eventually negotiated the cyber extortionists down and paid $30,000 in Bitcoin, but not before the region’s servers were disabled for about two weeks.
Bernard Thompson, from the municipality involved, says it was a tough decision: “It was hard, clearly, on the moral side of things that we had to pay a bunch of bandits,” he said.
Related:
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