The board says an investigation into the hack is still ongoing, and it will inform impacted residents once its complete.

But university officials say they are “working with leading external forensic experts and law enforcement to fully investigate” a ransomware attack.

It remains unclear why police were searching for the person, but civil libertarians worry of possible prosecutions of people who share files stolen by the foreign hackers.

“[L]ook at this wall of shame, you have every chance of not getting there, just pay us!” wrote the hackers in a message posted alongside the trove of D.C. police files and data.

The hackers are demanding $4 million from D.C. to delete the sensitive files they stole from the Metropolitan Police Department. They allege that the city offered $100,000 in payment and rejected it as too low.

The foreign hackers claimed to have stolen 250 gigabytes of sensitive D.C. police data, but over the course of the week seem to have backed away from threats to make it public if they are not paid a ransom.

“We have downloaded a sufficient amount of information from your internal networks, and we advise you to contact us as soon as possible, to prevent leakage,” said the hackers.

The Washington Post’s website was hacked today, the paper says, by “a hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

The D.C.-based daily deals company LivingSocial said today that personal information for 50 million if its customers around the world was recently exposed by hackers.

Hackers are often painted as a malicious bunch intent on crashing websites and stealing private information. But a new corps of hackers in D.C. seek to do just the opposite, using open data to improve government.