Anonymous, hero to the downtrodden, Internet mavericks who obey no laws and now, master blackmailers. Yep, the computer savvy kkids are at it again, only this time, Johnny Law was actually a step ahead of them, after catching out a member who tried to extort $50 000 from antivirus company Symnatec.

After having stolen source codes from the company, the Indian based hacker by the name of Yamatough, who is also a mamber of the ANonymous affiliated hacking group Lords of Dharamaja, tried to quietly convince the company to pay him, lest he expose several deadly flaws in the code.

After having spoken to what he thought was a Symnatec employee by the name of Sam Thomas over several weeks, Yamatough then issued him with the following statement;

We have a rule – and we always follow it:
If you are the owner – you have the right to be the first one
asked. That is why we kept silent at the time of negotiating with
you…

?How much do you consider ENOUGH to pay us in order to
work all the issues out?

Name the price,

Clock’s tikin

(You can read the full e-mail negotiations chain on Pastebin.)

After negotiations fell through though, Yamatough started releasing the source code, making himslef look more like a petty thief than a hacktivist. You’d think that Anonymous would wash their hands of Yamatough, but apparently, they’ve decided to embark on a ludicrous PR campaign, claiming that the Indian hacker was going to use the money to feed starving children instead.

With nobody being stupid enough to believe that story, Anonymous shifted gears and then claimed that Yamatough was just trolling Symantec.

“LOL!! press doesn’t seem to understand #Symantec got trolled. Code was always set for public release since beginning.”

Or as Yamatough told Reuters: “We tricked them into offering us a bribe so we could humiliate them.” Sure, everyone is going to believe that the organization which regularly bullies and itimidates other websites for personal gain wasn’t in it for the money.