I got hit by ransomware twice.
One time when one of the kids clicked on a bogus update for Minecraft, and the other time I thought I was updating some software.
Both time all my Documents and contents of my picture folder were encrypted before I realised what was happening.
Luckily I do regular backups on an external drive so did not loose too much, could have been a lot worse. 
I think they share one as a team. Personal emails are not allowed and most workplace communication is through their own system.
Oh, the hackers of Colonial “didn’t mean to cause problems”? What a pack of idiots. Theft is not a victimless crime, even if the target is a corporation with money.
On a related note - the days of lost pay are going to have an enormous impact on JBS employees, the lowest-paid ones least able to weather a financial hiccup. I’ve got customers bitching that ground beef and porkchops are going to go up in price, but not an ounce of sympathy for the folks who do the filthy work of butchering potentially having problems paying for rent and utilities.
The company I work for has been known to cover the wages of employees during hours/days of unexpected shut downs, but will JBS? There’s nothing to cover those employees other than the good will of the corporation executives, and you can’t rely on that in this world. Nice when you get it, but nothing to rely on.
I think they were trying to make it clear that they were not acting politically or as an agent of competing businesses, but yeah, they just came across as psychopaths when they said that.
They may have been stupid enough to think the company would just hand over the money quickly, too. Dark Side apparently has this little manifesto or something that they’re just going after companies with deep pockets and not actually hurting people, but you can’t target infrastructure-related stuff without causing problems, and I doubt you can target any large business without impacting the peons. The whole notion that you can be Robin Hood and steal from the rich without hurting the poor in this manner is bullshit.
Bonnie & Clyde, or one of the other gangsters who pretended to be Robin Hood would destroy loans when robbing a bank.
Excellent.
On the plus side, the recent attacks have impressed the US government that this is more than an annoyance - and apparently it will be a main topic when Biden meets Putin in a little while. This may persuade Putin that perhaps allowing hackers to ransom foreign businesses will have serious repercussions on Russia itself, and is not important enough to be allowed to continue. (General thought is these are not state actors, they simple shelter in Russia and are tolerated if they don’t hurt Russian businesses. Well, now they are starting to hurt Russia.)
I’ve seen spam-generating email where fast as we stamp it out, someone accidentally (!!?) clicks on it again and it re-sends to everyone. Funny thing was, the spam filter also applied outgoing and recognized it (finally) so only internal mailboxes kept getting hit. Finally I wrote a PowerShell script to delete any email with the following words in the subject line, and that effectively killed it.
Another case, they had to restore folders on the common share starting with A,B, or C. It appears a virus launched and encrypted the first two or three dozen folders in alphabetical order, before an AV recognized it and deleted it. (Let’s hear it for automatic virus definition updates!) We never found the virus PC, so assumption was it was deleted by the local AV while running. Note to self - turn on logging.
There once was a hack on Nantucket…
The company my cousin works for is a CPA firm. They do a lot of peoples taxes among other things I’m sure, but it’s mostly taxes. So they have a LOT of peoples personal identification, Social Security numbers and what not.
They where attacked about a week ago. I’m not sure if it’s ransom ware per-se, but they are shut down and the FBI is involved. The FBI sent in a computer forensics team, and it looks like they will have to replace all of their computers to start with (per my cousin).
Attorneys involved too. The company’s clients need to be notified.
If all that personal information was stolen, it will likely destroy the business.
One thing you can do to allay your fears is not save your credit card information at web sites where you do business. It’s very convenient to save your profile, and they always encourage you to do so but, by not saving that information, it can’t be stolen if and when they are breached.
Another self-defense method is to image your computer to an external hard drive dedicated to that purpose and then unplug it so that it cannot be infected if your machine is breached. You can then reset your hard drive and install the backup image that you created.
While that advise is generally good practice, you can’t be sure that the coders on that website didn’t mess up and your data is still hanging around in temp storage or logged somewhere. There have been plenty of cases where firms thought they weren’t storing important data only to find out that they were accidentally doing so. They have to register and transmit your CC information at some point; the question is do they remove all traces of it once the transaction is complete.
In that case my question is, are they then legally liable for losing information that their clients did not want them to keep and assumed they did not keep? It sure seems like they should be.
They’re liable whether you want them to keep it stored or not. That really doesn’t enter into it; they are responsible for keeping your data safe.
Yeah, I mean, even if they could target an actual billionaire who is literally rolling around in a big pile of banknotes on the floor, that lost money is probably going to be recouped in the form of no pay rise for the plebs on the factory floor this year.
They carried bitcoin in a bucket.
The market went down:
I can’t find any reference to this. BTW, those two stuck to robbing gas stations and small grocery stores for the most part-I think they robbed 10 banks or so in total.
Probably one of “the other gangsters who pretended to be Robin Hood”.
[Moderating]
Fixed spelling in title.