You Kidnapped My Cat?! Keep It!

Ransomware is a tricky enemy to fight. You feed the beast when you pay for it to go away. But what if it's not your cat but your dog that gets trapped by it? Can you still afford to say no? How to avoid those see-saw headaches and that endless dilemma?

- Pratima H

"Don't call the cops, or else". Remember these lines, said in a baritone note, and always accompanied with a cigarette smoke ring?

No matter which language you are watching it in, if it's a movie-scene showing a kidnapper's call these lines haunt the victim for at least five more scenes. More so, when the cops say exactly the same thing - "Don't pay the ransom, or else."

Caught between Syclla and Charybdis, the victims swing on an uneasy pendulum between 'should they, and 'should they not'. A question that has started giving migraines to many businesses too. Specially, since the arrival of a new breed of pirates. Ransomware.

Stay near the phone

Put simply, Ransomware is a special genre of cyberattack where a company is threatened with complete halt of operations or bad reputation just because the thieves have taken possession of its most crucial and sensitive data. To get the data back, and get the wheels of business moving again, the victim has to pay some ransom-as demanded by these data burglars.

We just saw it happen as recently as a few weeks back-with the Australian health insurer Medibank when data belonging to 9.7 million of its current and former customers was being held at ransom, as per some reports. At the time of writing, the company had decided not to pay ransom and there were rumours of some data being released on the dark web.