A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted – just the criminals’ promise.
This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a dark web forum, and the same (or another) crime crew could again demand an extortion payment to not leak the data.
It’s also a reminder that, despite the feds urging victims not to pay cybercriminals, sometimes coughing up the ransom demand seems to be the lesser of evils.
Read more…
Source: The Register
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