The Mayor of Antwerp Bart De Wever (Flemish nationalist) has told VRT News that the City of Antwerp will not pay a ransom to the hackers that carried out a cyber-attack of the city authorities’ servers. Speaking on VRT News’ Sunday morning televised topical debate programme ‘De zevende dag’, Mr De Wever said that no negotiations have been opened with the hackers that are threating to publish the data stolen from the city’s servers. Mayor De Wever also said that no ransom had been paid and nor would it be.
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Mayor of Antwerp responds to hackers’ ransom demand: "I will not pay and will not negotiate"
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Mr De Wever was adamant "I will not pay and there will be no negotiations." This was a very firm public reaction to the hackers’ gang Play’s cyber-attack on the City of Antwerp almost two weeks ago. The cyber-attack is still causing a lot of disruption to the city authority’s operations and services and a solution to the IT issues does not seem to be in sight yet.
The City of Antwerp has until midnight to pay a ransom to the hackers. Failure to do so will result in the hackers publishing personal data of potentially hundreds of thousands of people on the internet.
As we reported on Saturday there were suspicions that the City of Antwerp had negotiated with the hackers or perhaps even paid a ransom. This was after the hackers had removed the City of Antwerp from its website on the dark web. This has now been firmly denied by De Wever.
Apart from the denial the Mayor of Antwerp is remaining somewhat scant with information about the hacking.
"It is not advisable to comment much now. Experts and the court have told us same thing: shut up about it. It's like when burglar is still in your house”.