“Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups,” by Bloomberg’s Michael Riley: “Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms. At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the U.S. presidential election, said the people, who provided broad outlines of the campaign. At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway. Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession. Along with emails, the hackers are stealing documents from popular web-based applications like SharePoint, which lets people in different locations work on Microsoft Office files.”