Alleged Kaseya ransomware attacker arrives in Texas for trial


In cybersecurity history, the US Independence Day weekend of 2021 is not remembered for the restful and relaxing summer celebrations that you’d usually associate with the Fourth of July.

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Instead, it’s remembered as the weekend of the infamous Kaseya ransomware attack.

This was ransomware-with-a-difference, and the difference was the ultimate scale of the attack and the size of the side-effects.

In a typical attack against company X, vital files and data on X’s network get scrambled by the cybercriminals, disrupting X’s computer systems – often including laptops, servers and network services alike – and bringing business operations to a crushing halt.

Then comes a blackmail demand for Y dollars in Bitcoin, where Y is often in the hundreds-of-thousands range, and sometimes in the millions: “Give us the money and we’ll get your data back for you.”

Paying up gets you nothing more than a promise

Of course, the criminals don’t actually do the time-consuming work of recovering the files they just encrypted (and even if they offered to put in the hard yards for you, you almost certainly wouldn’t want them back onto your network anyway ).

The huge sum you’re paying doesn’t actually get your data back – it just offers you a promise of recovering it, by supplying the passwords needed to unscramble your ruined files.

That’s why the Sophos 2020 State of Ransomware Survey told us that the median cost of recovering from a ransomware attack amongst companies that had their own backups, and didn’t need to pay extortion money to the crooks, was close to 750,000

… While the median cost for those who had no choice but to pay up (or perhaps who thought that paying the crooks would somehow short-circuit the traditional complexity of disaster recovery) was almost exactly twice as much, at just under $ 1,500,000.

You’re paying the ransom merely for the hope of recovering data you might otherwise have lost forever, not for actually finalizing the process of recovering it.