Police chief: “Paying the Bitcoin ransom was the last resort”

A small town police department just outside of Boston finally agreed to pay a $500 ransom to regain access to a police server that it had been locked out of after being infected with CryptoLocker ransomware. As the name suggests, once the malware infects a computer, it encrypts the drive and can only be unlocked once the private key is entered—for which the criminals demand a ransom payment.

The Tewksbury Police Department chief told its local newspaper, the Tewksbury Town Crier that those who infected the computers in early December 2014 were "terrorists."

"Nobody wants to negotiate with terrorists. Nobody wants to pay terrorists," said Chief Timothy Sheehan. "We did everything we possibly could.