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Most Businesses Pay Ransomware Demands, IBM Finds (eweek.com)
According to an IBM Security report released on December 14, 70 percent of businesses impacted by ransomware end up paying the attackers. The amount varies but a majority of business respondents said they paid tens of thousands of dollars. eWeek reports: The 23-page IBM Security study surveyed 600 business leaders and 1,021 consumers in the U.S. 46 percent of business respondents reported that they had experienced ransomware in their organizations. Of the 46 percent that have been impacted by ransomware, 70 percent admitted that their organization paid the ransom. The amount paid to ransomware attackers varies, but of those business respondents that paid a ransom, 20 percent paid over $40,000, 25 percent paid between $20,000 and $40,000 and 11 percent paid between $10,00 to $20,000. On the consumer side, IBM's study found that the propensity to pay a ransom varies depending on whether or not the victim is a parent. 55 percent of consumers that identified themselves as being parents said they would pay a ransom to recover access to photos that had been encrypted, versus only 39 percent for consumers that don't have children. In an effort to help organizations respond quickly to ransomware threats, IBM's Resilient Incident Response Platform (IRP) is being enhanced with a new Dynamic Playbook for ransomware. Ted Julian, Vice President of Product Management and Co-Founder at Resilient, an IBM Company, explained that the basic idea behind the Dynamic Playbooks is to help provide organizations with an automated workflow or 'playbook' for how to deal with a particular security incident.
Most companies dont have a backup regimen.
with ransomware is if you pay the ransom, they unlock your data.
It seems weird to say it is a business, but as long as the criminals don't screw over the victims, the victims know they can pay and not lose anything.
But then I realized that I could have just downloaded the same porn again for free. I asked for my money back and the ransomers said no.
The survey clearly says that only 46 percent of the businesses surveyed had experienced ransomware and _of_this_ 70 percent had paid to get their files back. That means about 32.2 percent of the total sample had paid to get their files back.
I have a close friend who works for a large law firm, they were hit with ransomware for a few million dollars. From a business sense, they had no choice but to pay it. The ransomers were threatening to release all of their clients' data, so the executives all got together and paid it amongst themselves, hushing up the whole thing in the process. If they didn't pay, their business would have been over, even if they didn't face litigation from (ex) clients they would have all left in droves. The next month the company's IT budget had quadrupled, so there's a happy ending.
When IBM have failed multiple times to secure their own products/projects such as the recent Australia census, them providing security playbooks to others is a joke
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/11/25/1156258/ibm-to-pay-more-than-30-million-in-compensation-for-census-fail
May be they should first walk the talk and deliver secure products first before trying to advise others about security
> In an effort to help organizations respond quickly to
> ransomware threats, IBM's Resilient Incident
> Response Platform (IRP) is being enhanced with a
> new Dynamic Playbook for ransomware.
Here's my playbook:
Step 1: Have backups.
Step 2: Set up backups so they don't blindly overwrite good old data with newly-encrypted data.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
We got infected once on a computer in the IT support department. So the user had had a bit more access that the regular user which ment that more files got encrypted.
People with full administrative access however, are not given that through their regular user account.
But we were running snapshots every hour on all drives so we decided to roll back to before the infection. The whole problem were resolved fairly quickly in a few hours.
We discovered the problem before finding the user so we put all shares offline for a little while and cloned them to see what was going on.
Finding the user was somewhat difficult because of the ownership and creator of the encrypted files still pointed to the original user of the file and not the infected user.
But the ransom instruction HTML files that it placed were with the infected users account.
Make it a criminal offence to pay extortion demands, with massive fines for the officers at the top in charge of firms that pay out..
It's the only thing they take notice of,it's not worth fineing the company,that comes out of share holders money,if seniour managment are made personally responsible for fines,they would be far more careful with others data and the security of their systems.
... you never get rid of the Dane.
Rudyard Kipling, referring to the warrior/terrorist-Danes of a millennium or so ago, not the Danes of the early-20th century.
"That's a real nice database you have there. It would be ashame if something were to happen to it......"
Yet again hidden cost of using Microsoft's 'Windows' toy for real work.
Says the naive hater who has a compromised router and Android phone and doesn't even realise it.
Reroute the Hack to Putin's computer and they will never be heard from again.
Maybe send them to the Philippines with some pot and let Duarte handle them.
They are probably LGBTs living in Iran. Out them and let the Muslims show their tolerance.
I wonder if those companies factor that into their total cost of running Windows.
Business: "So, Windows licensing for our organization is $25,000 this year. Our Windows liability extortion costs due to Windows insecurity are $40,000 this year, and an extra $15,000 a year for security software that pretends to plug Windows' massive blunders."
Microsoft: "So, can we tell the press that your total cost of ownership for Windows is twenty dollars?"
Business: "WTF?!"
Microsoft: "Here's a cool twenty dollar bill if you let us lie."
Business: "Awesome! You've got a deal!"
The problem is if they didn't engage in "Collusion", the real world damage would have been far worse. This is why I really despise the so called justice system. A bunch of DORKS who sit in their ivory towers dreaming up more and more laws and fuck who they hurt or what kind of situations can arise which can unfairy entrap an otherwise law abiding citizen into either commiting a felony or have something far worse happen to them. (I am not saying that the lawyers did the right thing, but they had a choice of being fucked or superfucked)
Get good backups and rotate/dismount or have a one way vpn to a nas , we caught one here , flush , restore , move on ! The extra thing I did was breaking the code with hex workshop and blacklist infected download sites ...
..in other news, Watson has been retasked to find the *best* places to deposit ransom ware.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.