Now pull the other one

There is an old joke about a man who is talking with his doctor after having surgery on his hands. He asks the doctor, "will I be able to play the piano when I recover?". The doctor says yes, he'll make a full recovery. "Great," the man says, "I've always wanted to know how to play".

This morning I got email -- sent through the contact form on my personal web site -- from someone with "hacker" in the address (yeah, right):

We have hacked your website cellio.org and extracted your databases. This was due to the security holes you had in your your site/server which have gained us remote control of everything that was on the server.

Our team is mostly interested in customer, administrative, and employee information which we have extracted through your databases once we got remote control over the server. It still needs to be sorted out but it will be well-organized once finished. First, we will be going through the emails/sms information and contacting the recipient how you held in disregard about their information being exposed to a hacking group when you could have stopped it. This would be detrimental to your personal image with these relationships with these people. Lastly, now that we have information not only will we be monetizing off it with our methods but made public or sold to other people that will do whatever they wish with the information also after we are done.

Now you can put a stop to this by paying a $3000 fee (0.11 BTC) in bitcoin. You can find our address by visiting [redacted] where you can copy and paste the address or scan the QR code. We will be notified of payment which we will then delete the information we have obtained, patch the hole in the site/server which we got in and remove you from any future targeting in the future. You have 72 hours in doing so after viewing this message or the series of steps will commence. You can obtain bitcoin through such services such [...]

<snark>

Gosh, I'd sure like to have that database full of employee and customer information. Wow, I have employees and customers! And a database! Maybe as a show of good faith you could tell me some of the information you "extracted"? Or if that's too hard, let's start with: what kind of database did you say that was? Surely you can tell me that.

I'm also curious about why you took the inefficient route here. Your email to webmaster got filtered as spam; I happened to notice it but could easily have missed it. Since you have my database full of contact information, why didn't you contact me directly? Just a helpful tip for reaching your future "customers" -- take the direct path.

Oh, and since you've got remote control of my server anyway, could you upgrade to the latest Emacs? I've been meaning to do that. You do want a good review for customer service, right?

Finally, since your proposal includes commitments to future actions on your part, please provide a verifiable contact address in case I need to make a claim.

</snark>