On Monday, the VPN service Cloak got an unsettling email: if the owners didn’t cough up 10 bitcoin (or $4,400) in the next week, the service would be hit by a denial-of-service attack large enough to bring down the service entirely. The fallout from that downtime would easily cost more than $4,400, so the criminals offered an early payoff as an easy way to avoid all that damage. But today — a full five days before the ransom demand came due — the company struck back, going public with the demand and promising to withstand any attack criminals attempted. “We apologize for any disruption as a result of these attacks; please know that we will do everything in our power to thwart them,” the company wrote in a blog post today. “But let us reiterate: no matter what happens, we simply will not pay these garden-variety thugs.”
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ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Verge
