Hacked company CTO refuses to pay ransom demand, donates money to funding research instead

• Checkout.com refuses to pay a ransom to ShinyHunters following breach
• It will donate the ransom amount to two universities instead
• CTO Mariano Albera stresses “security, transparency and trust”

Checkout.com CTO Mariano Albera has confirmed the company was targeted by a digital extortion attempt by the group ShinyHunters during the first week of November 2025, but the outcome might not be as you’d expect.

Attackers accessed a legacy third-party cloud file storage system that had not been properly decommissioned by Checkout.com, affecting internal operation documents and merchant onboarding materials from 2020 and before.

“We estimate that this would affect less than 25% of our current merchant base,” Albera noted.