While the F.B.I. advises victims of ransomware attacks not to negotiate with their hackers, arguing that it can incentivize criminal behavior, more than half of affected companies pay up.
A few days after Thanksgiving last year, Kurtis Minder got a message from a man whose small construction-engineering firm in upstate New York had been hacked. Minder and his security company, GroupSense, got calls and e-mails like this all the time now, many of them tinged with panic. An employee at a brewery, or a printshop, or a Web-design company would show up for work one morning and find all the computer files locked and a ransom note demanding a cryptocurrency payment to release them.
The F.B.I. advises victims to avoid negotiating with hackers, arguing that paying ransoms incentivizes criminal behavior. This puts victims in a tricky position. “To just tell a hospital that they can’t pay—I’m just incredulous at the notion,” Philip Reiner, the C.E.O. of the nonprofit Institute for Security and Technology, told me.
After college, in the early nineties, he got a tech-support job at a local Internet-service provider. Within a year, he was promoted to assistant systems administrator, a job that entailed keeping tabs on the server logs. He began to notice a strange pattern, which he eventually realized was evidence of hackers. “They would use our routers as what we would now call a pivot point—bouncing off them to attack someone else, so the attack looked like it was coming from us,” he said.
Criminal syndicates are behind most ransomware attacks. In their online interactions, they display a mixture of adolescent posturing and professionalism: they have a fondness for video-game references and the word “evil,” but they also employ an increasingly sophisticated business structure. The larger groups establish call centers to help talk victims through the confusing process of obtaining cryptocurrency, and they promise discounts to those who pay up in a timely fashion.
When companies seem reluctant to negotiate, executives receive threatening phone calls and LinkedIn messages. Last year, the Campari Group issued a press release downplaying a recent ransomware attack. In response, hackers launched a Facebook ad campaign, using the profile of a Chicago d.j., whom they had also hacked, to shame the beverage conglomerate. “This is ridiculous and looks like a big fat lie,” they wrote.
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