Family Business Refuses to Back Down After Hackers Try To Extort Them

WEST JORDAN, Utah – While employees at Sorrensen Sand and Gravel were hard at work Monday, hackers were working harder to extort the business out of thousands of dollars.

The hackers, pretending to be an employee from the family website, rockutah.com, threatened to send out an email to customers, warning their product was dangerous.

Tyler Sorrensen’s family company sells a lot of different rocks — “Over a hundred,” he showed KSL TV. “Right here we have the Southbound Cobble, Desert Star Granite and the Salt Lake gravel, which is a quartz product.”

He was not expecting the rock hackers threw at his inbox.

“They were asking for $6,500 to not send the first batch of emails,” Sorrensen said.

The hacker emails would have said rock shipments at the store were contaminated.

But Sorrensen refused to cooperate with the hackers.

“Now, they have actually offered less, but they aren’t able to guarantee anything,” he said.

Sorrensen took to the rockutah.com website, where he put up a message for customers to call him directly. He said the company has contacted most customers to explain what happened. Only one sale was canceled.

“We made sure that the credit card information is protected,” Sorrensen said. “We don’t retain any of that on our servers, so we know that is secure.”

Like a rock, the company’s resolve is solid.

“Well, we are gonna get through it,” Sorrensen said. “Our goal from the beginning was to not give in.”

Utahrock.com reported the threat to the FBI, local police and the Utah Department of Health.