Radiohead music gets stolen. Band refuse to pay ransom.
Cyber crooks know now not to bother trying to mess with UK rock band Radiohead after the band opted to release 18 hours of music instead of paying a blackmail ransom after the music was stolen.
18 hours of music that was recorded during the making of Radiohead’s 1997 OK Computer album was stolen by hackers who demanded $150,000 for it. Failure to pay and the crooks would leak the music online.
It doesn’t appearing paying up was on the agenda for Radiohead, though. In a statement, the band announced that they themselves would release all 18 hours of the music, charging a mere £18 for it, with all proceeds going to pro-environmental group Extinction Rebellion (perhaps most famous recently for their protests in London.)
“For £18 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom” said guitarist Jonny Greenwood in a Facebook post.
Details of how the music was stolen are not known. In the Facebook post, the band vaguely attributed the theft to someone “stealing” Thom Yorke’s minidisk archive, presumably a digital stash of the music. As such, crooks must have somehow gained access to Yorke’s account where the music was stored.
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Short of breaking past the security defences of the website where the music was stored, it is possible the crooks may have launched a phishing attack against the band to trick them into revealing the login information.
Either way, the bands refusal to pay-up is something that security experts recommend. Even taking into account there is no guarantee the crooks will honour their side of the bargain, paying a ransom only increases the motivation for crooks to continue with these sorts of crimes in the future.
We can only hope the cyber crooks spent a considerable amount of time trying to gain illicit access to the music, only for their hopes of a payday being quickly dashed by Radiohead’s refusal to pay up.
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