Nokia Paid Millions Of Euros To Blackmailers In 2008

What do you think of blackmail attempts? Well, those have happened in the past, and it does not look as though it is going to stop anytime soon in the near future, either. We have cases of a relationship gone sour where one party blackmailing the other person after having possession of images of he/she in poses that would make one’s parents blush, all the way to large companies being asked for a large sum of money before their externally disrupted services are restored. Microsoft’s Nokia, as was revealed by MTV in Finland, apparently forked out an unspecified amount of money to the tune of several million euros all the way back in 2008, after blackmailers threatened to publish the Symbian operating system source code.

MTV claimed that these criminals managed to pick up an encryption key for a core component of the Symbian OS, and threatened Nokia that they would do all that they can in order to make it public, unless Nokia forked out a decent amount of money. Apparently, publishing this particular encryption key would have virtually enabled just about anyone and everyone with basic programming knowledge of Symbian to be able to write malware that is touted to be ‘indistinguishable’ from the operating system itself.

The Finnish police have also confirmed that this actually happened, and after half a dozen years, the case remains open and is being investigated. Detective Chief Inspector Tero Haapala said, ‘We are investigating felony blackmail, with Nokia the injured party,” in a curt and short statement. The blackmailers managed to lose the trail of the police after picking up the money, and have more or less evaded capture since then.