local government2 articles
Small US County Paid $1 Million to Make Stolen Data Go Away. It Might Not Have.
A US county government, reportedly Union County, Ohio, paid a $1 million Bitcoin ransom to the Kairos cyber extortion group following a May 2025 brute-force attack in which over 2 terabytes of data were stolen. Negotiations began at $100,000 and ended at $1 million after the attackers imposed a hard deadline, with the group originally demanding $3 million. The breach ultimately affected over 45,000 individuals whose sensitive personal, financial, and medical information was compromised, though no file-encrypting ransomware was involved and there is no independent verification that the stolen data was actually deleted.
A U.S. County Paid $1 Million to a Group That Never Even Locked a Single File
A U.S. government entity, likely Union County, Ohio, paid approximately $1 million in bitcoin to a group called Kairos after hackers stole over 1.6 million files and threatened to publish sensitive records, including data from the prosecutors' office. Unlike typical ransomware attacks, Kairos never encrypted any systems — it relied solely on the threat of leaking stolen data as leverage, reflecting a growing trend where extortion groups skip encryption entirely. After a month-long negotiation, the county paid ten times its opening offer, receiving only an unverifiable "proof of deletion" in return, with blockchain tracing linking the funds to exchanges including Bybit, OKX, and a Russian service.