Chinese shopping platform Pandabuy told BleepingComputer it previously paid a a ransom demand to prevent stolen data from being leaked, only for the same threat actor to extort the company again this week.
It’s bad business to not be honest and trustworthy. If a hacker group is known to always give back the data and not strike twice, they are obviously much more likely to get paid. No one’s paying someone known for ripping off. We see this in company ransomwware all the time. They are friendly, helpful in explaining the breech, and professional. If they were the opposite, they’d be broke.
I mean news like this is the best way to stop people paying, I hope every business that doesn’t pay sends the hackers this article and says this is why
Never pay ransomware. Just write the data off. Learn how to take decent backups
It’s bad business to not be honest and trustworthy. If a hacker group is known to always give back the data and not strike twice, they are obviously much more likely to get paid. No one’s paying someone known for ripping off. We see this in company ransomwware all the time. They are friendly, helpful in explaining the breech, and professional. If they were the opposite, they’d be broke.
It’s an interesting dynamic where the ransomware groups have to be reliable and professional for their business model to work.
It was the same with Pirates, if you get a bad Rep with your extortion business you’re just making your own life harder down the line
The article says that they weren’t paying to recover their only copy of data, but to prevent it from being leaked:
Backups (or more backups) wouldn’t have helped.
Not ransomware but just ransom to data exfil by a vulnerable API. But paying is still a dumb idea.
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"Hi, I just sent the ransom payment to the Bitcoin address you provided.
"Now you’ll unlock my data, right?
“… right?”
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Sure. Make it profitable to the hackers to keep doing it.
If the alternative is “likely go out of business”, then yeah…
They already made it profitable for the hackers by not backing their data up properly, this is just that bill coming due.
I mean news like this is the best way to stop people paying, I hope every business that doesn’t pay sends the hackers this article and says this is why
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How is someone getting control of their data by paying a ransom?
The opposing actor still has your data, so it doesn’t really matter how much you pay, you’ll never be able to mitigate that security issue, surely?
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