Pay to receive access to your own data
Earlier this week, an Almatoise company resolved to pay the ransom demanded by hackers in order to recover its data trapped by ransomware.
In practical terms, this is not really a surprise, because many companies in the same case have resolved where the ransom would be paid. And the problem is that many companies can't really boast of being totally safe.
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The company we are talking about here is a company with five entities with more than 225 employees, and computer attacks have started since the beginning of November. "I just don't want to be in the limelight. What matters to me is to tell my story so that more people, companies, are aware of the phenomenon of computer hacking and put all the chances on their side to minimize the risks of getting caught and the consequences that go with it" means the source who gave more details about computer hacking.
According to him, the hackers demanded a double ransom. "We no longer had access to any administrative files. I quickly understood what had happened. We were the victims of a computer attack with a memo asking us for a ransom to recover our data. I had the choice to do business with a specialized IT firm to decrypt, but it would have taken months of research and work. ». In this context, the officials agreed to pay the ransom. "The decision was made to contact the hacker through an email address. In fact, you don't communicate with a person, you communicate with a system that protects scammers. It was decided after reflection to pay the required amount, a few thousand dollars, and in virtual currency bitcoin, virtually impossible to trace. We were able to recover a lot of our data, but not all of it. The hacker demanded another ransom, a little less than the first, to recover the balance. I had put a maximum amount not to exceed and we paid. Almost everything has been recovered. »
The first mistake that was theirs was first to believe that they were shelter like the majority of entrepreneurs. "My controller and I are young people and we know computer science quite well. We thought it was all about backup. our servers every night before leaving the office and with our security in place, we were armored. Of course not! It takes a lot more than that. What saved us was that some of our files were protected by Linux system. But for the other systems, we were vulnerable."
This kind of In this case, it is necessary admitting it is not at all isolated. Dozens of companies are subject to this kind of problems around the world "You never hear or hear almost talk about specific cases of computer fraud. But I can tell you that I know a lot of people who are victims of it. It feels so much helpless when it happens to us. We think we're safe, but we're not safe not really, " said the boss of the Almatoise company. the latter requires the establishment of an agency government that will be responsible for ensuring this kind of problem, in a sense a dedicated specifically to computer fraud to help victims in real time. he adds: "It could have been so much worse for us. same there, my team and I experienced a terrible stress, we were under pressure. It really was a dark time. If we had not been able to recover it would have taken at least a full year to get us out of it. You can imagine what it means to lose money, time and energy. I don't even dare think about it. ».
In order not to live this problem, company decided to entrust its security to a company specialized in cybersecurity. The good thing about this company, the director had mentioned, was that the accounting system was not infected by the computer attack.
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