The hackers who claim they stole 250 gigabytes of internal D.C. police files now say negotiations with the city have “reached a dead end” and are threatening to publicly release the confidential data tomorrow unless the city meets their demand for a $4 million ransom payment.

The Russian-speaking hackers also released chat logs, which DCist/WAMU has been unable to independently verify, that indicate the city offered $100,000 in payment.

“The amount we were offered does not suit us… if during tomorrow they do not raise the price, we will release all the data,” wrote the group known as Babuk on its website overnight. Along with the threat, the hackers posted what they say are confidential personnel files on 20 officers.

Late last month, they also briefly posted similar information on five current and former police officers, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, polygraph test results, and more. In the wake of that data being made public, D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee advised officers and department employees to sign up for credit monitoring.

D.C. officials did not respond to a request for comment on any possible negotiations with Babuk. Last month, Mayor Muriel Bowser would only say that “we have a process in place and we’re following that process,” though she declined to delve into what that process was.

Cybersecurity experts say governments and companies should steadfastly refuse to pay ransoms when data is hacked, for fear of it merely encouraging other hackers. Neither Atlanta nor Baltimore paid a ransom when they were hit by hackers in 2018 and 2019, though in those cases the hackers merely encrypted the data they gained access to.

In D.C.’s case, though, the hackers have taken the additional step of threatening to make the sensitive data — which is said to include names of informants, officer discipline files, and details on alleged gang members — public. Cybersecurity expert Allan Liska says that could change the city’s considerations over whether to negotiate and pay.

“When you talk to security people, that’s what we’ll tell you, right? Never pay the ransom. All you do is make the ransom actors more effective at what they do. All that money goes into funding to make the next person who’s a victim of them more miserable,” he says. “But that’s not really the only consideration. There’s a whole lot of very sensitive information that was stolen. And so the D.C. police are in a hard place because you can’t let that stolen information get out. And they don’t have control to be able to get that data back once it’s stolen.”

In the alleged chats, the hackers and the city go back and forth about the fairness of the amount demanded; at one point the group apparently argues that the police department can afford the sum, given that this is the nation’s capital.

In a report published earlier this year, software security company McAfee said Babuk “started this business very recently, with limited ransomware coding experience.” Still, the group had some early successes, largely targeting private businesses. But at some point the hackers took aim at government entities; last month a Portland-area school district closed for two days after a hack Babuk claimed credit for.

Still, since stealing the D.C. police data the Babuk hackers have publicly alternated between bluster and backtracking. They have advertised their demand for a ransom one day, only to remove all claims of the hack the next and pledge to close up shop altogether. In an interview with a Polish cybersecurity website, the hackers even admitted concern over possible repercussions for stealing data from a police department.

“We do not want to be associated with politics or Russian ‘state’ hackers,” they said. “We will not attack government entities anymore because we do not want to cause a conflict between the Russian Federation and the United States.”

But on Tuesday, the hackers returned to bluster, threatening D.C. over the impending publication of the police files. “You still have the ability to stop it,” they wrote.