Earlier this week, the hacker group ‘Rhysida’ stole 5.79 TB of data from Berlin agencies, including personal passwords (stored in a Word document 
), emails, phone numbers and other internal documents, such as employee references. They demanded a ransom of 30 Bitcoin by Friday (today).
The Berlin Senate previously pleaded not to pay the ransom (as it is apparently legally prohibited for the state to pay ransoms). The data is now publicly available on the dark web.
I think companies and governments should pay ransoms if they’re reasonable. Not paying is not gonna work. What would work is taking cybersecurity seriously and that’s the only good choice in the long term.
No, paying is a bad idea because you have no way of verifying whether the attackers will respect the payment and not just sell the information anyways.
They are incentivized to not leak it if you pay to increase trust.
Countries should forbid paying ransom by law. This would decrease incentive for ransomeware gangs and potentially result in less attacks in a country. Paying does not give you much:
This might be a short term incentive, which stands against the incentive to earn additional money by selling the data. But what will happen, if the ransomeware gang splits up some time in the future? Don’t you think they will publish it anyway to get some money for the data on the black market, since their reputation won’t matter anymore?
The right decision in principle to not pay, but I feel for every government employee and citizen that has yet another data leak and potential identity fraud vector to manage. Sigh.
Agree, to an extent. These government departments should have budget for security audits and things like ethical hacking to discover vulnerabilities first. In this case, they just had a very effective security audit done and the findings and data made public. Use your budget to offset retroactively what you didn’t (but should’ve done) proactively.
It included way more sensitive stuff like photocopies of IDs…