And do what just close the company yeah right. It does not take a major company long being shut down to burn thru $4-5mm. They will probably spend that much after the fact upgrading system security so it does not repeat. I am not an expert on this subject but know a little bit and you are basically FUBAR if you don’t pay unless you have some secure system backups. What happens a lot of the time is they corrupt the backups at the same time of the attack leaving you dead in the water.

They must hide servers in the same place killary does.

Good points HR. This is not a Yankee thang. If this country's business infrastructure is interconnected (and it is) this will affect everyone in the US and probably many around the world.

Maybe Colonial demanded a ransom from Demented Joe - the feds pay the ransom, either directly or just reimburse Colonial, or they let the gas shortage misery drag on a few more weeks...

Being an educator pays, but not enough.
The real payment is hoping I/we make a difference in a kid's life, or should I say, "life choices."

I do leave my politics and religion out of the classroom.

Regardless, education pays, but not enough.

Crime DOES pay.
I'm about to cross over!

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There was a time in our history that "messing with US" (whether citizen or business) meant "messing with the United States." There were consequences. Those consequences weren't always immediately known or obvious, but they did happen at times. Payback could be h3ll. With the current Resident, I don't think an adversary has much to worry about with respect to retribution. The chief Resident just hoping someone will rub the hair on his legs again.

Someone’s email got hacked and it triggered a 3 year investigation and cost the taxpayers 40 million. This hack is just business as usual.

From what I heard earlier today, they paid and got a deciphering tool to unlock the data on their computers, but it was so slow, the company just uploaded the data from backup disks instead.

They should have done that first.

Happens all the time.

But they don't officially pay any ransom. They hire a third party software security company to assist in unlocking their files. Software computer company goes to the hackers and makes a deal with them through a conduit.

Third party software company says that they hired a "consultant". To assist in helping release the system. So the company never officially paid a bribe but they basically hired people through which to pay the ransom.

This is not new this has been going on for 10 years. To police departments hospitals private businesses Banks etc etc.

While people were distracted about building a wall on the border the real threat is not coming over a river.

If they wanted to they could shut down the whole country pretty much. Power, internet, gasoline production and transport etc.