What is Illegal These Days? (Score 1)

Now I understand that these crackers used a ton of illegal credit cards. What I want to know is, is it illegal to go to a company and say, we have found some problems with the security of your system and we were wondering if you would be interested in paying us to fix them. Now I'm not talking about releasing all of their customer credit cards if they don't comply... I'm talking about just asking for money to fix a problem. Is that illegal?