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US School Agrees To Pay $8,500 To Get Rid Of Ransomware (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, the media was abuzz with the case of the Hollywood hospital that almost shut down its operations because of a ransomware infection, which it eventually paid. Something similar happened around the same time in a South Carolina school district when ransomware shut down an elementary school's servers. The school had to pay $8,500.
Do we really want to be teaching children to negotiate with terrorists?
The obvious way around that is to stop calling everyone who breathes a "terrorist".
$8500 is cheaper than paying a decent SysAdmin. These criminals know at what point to price their services so that these institutions can continue putting their clients at risk.
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It would be better if it became the habit to spend money on security. That $8500 would have gone a long way towards decent security measures.
One wonders, though, what an elementary school district needs with 25 servers (or more; tfa says 25 were affected). What was so mission critical that it was worth paying cash to get back? Why not just format the affected machines, reinstall, and be done with it? The database that says litte Timmy got a B last year just aren't mission critical.
One wonders, though, what an elementary school district needs with 25 servers
There are a lot of federal dollars available for things like "computers in the classroom" and "cops in schools" that don't really make much sense, but, hey, it's free money, and can't be used for anything else. The elementary school that my kid attends has a $250,000 Cisco enterprise system that handles less traffic than the $39 Netgear router that I have at home. A federal grant paid for it, and on top of that, Cisco made a nice donation to the enrichment program, so it was a no-brainer.
You start paying, they find more targets, make their scam more professional, etc.
That isn't all bad. In the past, insecure systems were hijacked and used as spam-bots, so the cost of the insecurity was borne by others. At least with ransomware the cost is borne directly by the bozos running MS-Windows on their servers.