White Wolf Publishing, a Stone Mountain videogame operator, is single-handedly defying an international extortion ring.

The company, which is snuggled in behind shopping centers off Memorial Drive near Hairston had its registration database hacked. This was followed by a demand for money on December 11. White Wolf, which delivers role-playing games to the Web with titles like Vampire Masquerade,  decided to go public with the crime and cooperate with the FBI.

The bad guys got user names and encrypted passwords, which might lead to credit card data if they had time to decrypt them. So White Wolf changed those passwords, and apologized for the inconvenience.

Security experts say the extortion racket is yet-another ratchet up in a continuing online crime war that began in 2004. Most targeted sites are small businesses like White Wolf, and in the past criminals have simply threatened to unleash Distributed Denial of Service attacks against their victims, essentially closing-off access to the sites with bogus connections launched from unsuspecting users whose PCs are under the control of zombie programs sent them by the criminals.

This looks like a straight-up snatch, grab, pay us or we use the data story. What's unusual is White Wolf's willingness to fight. If everyone did fight these crimes would become much, much tougher to pull off.