FRUGAL FAMILY

FBI Told Teamsters to ‘Just Pay’ a $2.5 Million Hacking Ransom. They Refused.

After some attempted negotiations to get the ransom down to $1.1 million, the notoriously tough union decided that they would just remake their systems.

The labor union Teamsters refused to hand over a $2.5 million ransom when they were hacked in 2019, despite the FBI telling them to “just pay it,” NBC News reports. Two years ago, the hackers demanded money through a site on the dark web in exchange for lifting the block placed on the union’s system. “They locked down the entire system and said if we paid them they would give us the encryption code to unlock it,” an anonymous source told NBC. They asked the FBI for help but, due to a slew of similar ransomware attacks at the time, the source claimed the FBI told them to just pay up. “They said, ‘This is happening all over D.C. ... and we’re not doing anything about it,’” another anonymous source said.

After some attempted negotiations to get the ransom down to $1.1 million, the notoriously tough union decided that they would just remake their systems and were able to restore the majority of their data. A Teamsters spokesperson said that members’ information was never compromised in the breach.