this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Agree. I know IT loves to take their shortcuts but companies typically don't funds security well enough.
I have was closely involved in a large ransomware attack. Locked down the entire company when they got into the backend of the virtual servers. The ransom was initially 1.5 million of which the company said they would pay 750,000. (They had professional negotiating team). When they offered that, the rate was increased to two million as they were 'insulted'. During this period the IT head recalled he had made a backup to AWS if I recall. Just didn't want to announce it till he was entirely sure it was complete. He ended up recovering with only about two weeks of lost days. Can't imagine the CEO'S reaction when he was told of this. The ransomware dudes were told to pound sand. I would have sent 20 bucks.
Looking at logs, they estimated they had been compromised for a month. Multiple client computers had key loggers. That in itself is not a fault of IT but where they went wrong was to expedite desktop updates, they would remote into secure machines from the less secure desktops to access machines that could see the VM backend and at one point they must have accessed the VM themself. Now the loggers have all the passwords. They knew not to do that but who wants to get their laptop all set up when you have a running machine in front of you? CEO can demand that doesn't happen but they don't know enough about the security issues to know what is a real risk and what isn't.
Damn, I'm a bit surprised the ransomware team didn't negotiate and was 'offended'. Is that a known thing, not to try to negotiate? I suppose at that point the attackers know how much the company is worth, what profits are, etc. But now they also know you don't have backups and are willing to pay a large amount of money to get your data back.
The worst thing you can do at a large company is not have someone knowledgeable and active in network monitoring because if they successfully exfiltrated that data like they normally try to do, now not only are they 'offended' enough to demand 25% more, they're pissed off and willing to sell your proprietary data to competitors for pennies.
Ransomware gangs operate on the honor system (funny, but true) because if it's known that you won't get your data back even after you pay, nobody is going to pay. I think some of them have policies of dumping your data for free if you don't pay.
I think it was right at the beginning. They may have low balled then the ransom guys came back with even a higher value. I don't think the data have much in the value as it was mainly their ap and AR. One issue was they had in-house project management software developed that had hundreds of projects on the go and the stage they were at if I recall correctly.
I think you almost need to have a seperate department with a single IT guy whose only job is to test the security procedures. Not implement them but to just double check on the normal IT security procedures.