"The hackers stated that they attempted to contact Red Hat with an extortion demand but received no response other than a templated reply instructing them to submit a vulnerability report to their security team."
Just hilarious
Just hilarious
"According to them, the created ticket was repeatedly assigned to additional people, including Red Hat's legal and security staff members."
Summarized: Given enough eyeballs, all extortion demands are fallow.
Thanks, hadn't encountered this word before.
“Since RedHat doesn't want to answer to us,” the hackers wrote in a channel on Telegram viewed by 404 Media, suggesting they have attempted to contact Red Hat. [...]
“We have given them too much time already to answer lol instead of just starting a discussion they kept ignoring the emails,” the message added. In another message, the group said it had “gained access to some of their clients' infrastructure as well, already warned them but yeah they preferred ignoring us.”
https://www.404media.co/red-hat-investigating-breach-impacti...
First rule of having someone reply: spell their name correctly.
What you must do immediately is notify the affected customers, bring down or lock the affected services, and contact the authorities.
If an attacker make an extortion threat, but then still follows through on the release/damage after being paid, then people are not incentivized to engage with you, and will go into attack mode right away, making it riskier for you.
HOWEVER, if the attacker make the extortion threat, takes payment, and then honors the agreement, and ends the transaction, then parties are more inclined to just pay to make the problem go away. They know that the upfront price is the full cost of the problem.
I've seen that there are 'ethical attackers' out there that move on after an attack, but you never know what kind you're dealing with :-/ "Never negotiate...."
Reputation isn't all that useful for extortion.
Running all your crimes as the "Wet Bandits" makes it much easier for law enforcement if they do catch up with you.
I sincerely hope that the game doesn’t become prophetic in the manner Idiocracy has.