Bad news — paying a ransomware demand might cause hackers to come back and ask for more
Pro Security Bad news — paying a ransomware demand might cause hackers to come back and ask for more News By Sead Fadilpašić Published 24 July 2026 Hackers really have no incentive to walk away from a victim, experts say When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. At the same time, there is no guarantee that the decryption keys will work, that the attackers will really delete the files they had stolen, and that they won’t strike again in a few weeks.This final argument has now been proven. While around half (56%) of victims paid one ransom and regained access, more than a third (37%) faced a second extortion demand soon after paying.
- ▪Pro Security Bad news — paying a ransomware demand might cause hackers to come back and ask for more News By Sead Fadilpašić Published 24 July 2026 Hackers really have no incentive to walk away from a victim, experts say When you purchase t
- ▪At the same time, there is no guarantee that the decryption keys will work, that the attackers will really delete the files they had stolen, and that they won’t strike again in a few weeks.This final argument has now been proven.
- ▪While around half (56%) of victims paid one ransom and regained access, more than a third (37%) faced a second extortion demand soon after paying.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/bad-news-paying-a-ransomware-demand-might-cause-hackers-to-come-back-and-ask-for-more |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 05:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T05:00:46.349Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T05:00:46.349Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 5ANIVFSrA7wO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Pro Security Bad news — paying a ransomware demand might cause hackers to come back and ask for more News By Sead Fadilpašić Published 24 July 2026 Hackers really have no incentive to walk away from a victim, experts say When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Proofpoint 2026 AI‑Era Ransomware Report found 54% of victims paid attackers despite warnings37% faced repeat extortion after paying; 2% paid but never regained access to filesExperts urge prevention: phishing awareness, offline backups, and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechRadar.
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