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NASCAR Team Pays Ransomware Fee To Recover Files Worth $2 Million (softpedia.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the give-in-to-demands dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "NASCAR team Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing (CSLFR) revealed today it faced a ransomware infection this past April when it almost lost access to crucial files worth nearly $2 million, containing car parts lists and custom high-profile simulations that would have taken 1,500 man-hours to replicate," reports Softpedia. "The infection took place on the computer belonging to CSLFR's crew chief. Winston's staff detected the infection when encrypted files from Winston's computer began syncing to their joint Dropbox account." It was later discovered that he was infected with the TeslaCrypt ransomware. Because the team had no backups of the crucial data, they eventually paid the ransom (around $500). This happened before TeslaCrypt's authors decided to shut down their operations and release free decryption keys.

9 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. BACKUPS PEOPLE! by thedarb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SERIOUSLY!

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    1. Re:BACKUPS PEOPLE! by zugmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But... But... There was a backup! The files were on the laptop, and on the cloud (everything's safe and secure in the cloud, just ask a cloud services provider salesman), and on everyone else's computer that used that Dropbox account.

      All snark aside, you wanna know what's really awesome? If just ONE computer that used that Dropbox account had good backups going, they could have restored the whole mess from there. Restore for only $500? They should have offered to take those scammers out to dinner as well.

    2. Re: BACKUPS PEOPLE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or, you know, use revision control that's built into Dropbox

  2. Re:Hey, dummies by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or Dropbox's "packrat" option? Yeah, good luck encrypting that.

  3. Re:Because the team had no backups of the crucial by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    They can only turn left. What do you expect?

  4. No Reverse Gear. by zenlessyank · · Score: 5, Funny

    So no backing up!!

  5. NASCAR: we R 2 dumb by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Because the team had no backups of the crucial data..."

    (sigh) Seems like someone at the NASCAR IT department needs adult supervision.

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    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  6. Re:Because the team had no backups of the crucial by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    Yeah, they were lucky that these files only got encrypted, which means they could get them back.

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    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  7. Re:Hey, dummies by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    Git was kind of designed (partly) to solve the backup problem......

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    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."