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Petya Ransomware Authors Demand $250,000 In First Public Statement Since Attack (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The group responsible for last week's globe-spanning ransomware attack has made their first public statement. Motherboard first spotted the post, which was left on the Tor-only announcement service DeepPaste. In the message, the Petya authors offer the private encryption key used in the attack in exchange for 100 bitcoin, the equivalent of over $250,000 at current rates. Crucially, the message includes a file signed with Petya's private key, which is strong evidence that the message came from the group responsible for Petya. More specifically, it proves that whoever left the message has the necessary private key to decrypt individual files infected by the virus. Because the virus deleted certain boot-level files, it's impossible to entirely recover infected systems, but individual files can still be recovered. The message also included a link to a chat room where the malware authors discussed the offer, although the room has since been deactivated.
If you pay them then you simply add fuel to the fire. The best thing to do is migrate to a secure OS and restore all the data you can and fire anyone managing a division that doesn't have full backups.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
his old what?
The source of the attack, the accounting company could buy it's way out of what seems very much like an insider attack, possibly even at management level. Basically a way for the accounting company to save face, except it now makes them look as guilty as hell ie $250,000 seems really low ball for what is likely to be a dead as fuck software accounting company (who the fuck will trust them with future upgrades). As for the Russia shit, it just makes the company look even worse, exactly what insiders would do. So the accounting software company pretends to pay and releases the key to their customers to attempt to regain some trust.
Easy to scope out, check out the revenues for the company over the last few years to see if they are stagnating or falling off and consider they were hoping to make millions before realising in the most stupid fashion, that as the leading source of the attack, their customers would blame them for the losses and go with different accounting software. When it comes to financial stuff and risks, trust once burned pretty much never comes back.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"Corporate" space is a small subset of "business" space.
Most companies do NOT have IT departments. They outsource that on a break/fix basis, and do NOT want to pay for maintenance.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Agree that the US is on the hook morally and perhaps financially for any ill coming from the NSA spy tools that have fallen into the wrong hands, but you have a redundancy on your hands suggesting "moron IT people" who failed to patch their systems are to blame, too. The faulty decision was not failure to patch; it was adopting a vulnerable and frequently attacked OS to begin with. If someone driving a car with no brakes, no seatbelts, and low pressure in one tire, gets into an accident, do you say the problem was they failed to inflate the tire?