Ransomware Victims Should Haggle Over Price
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 07/20/2016 06:48 AM
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If you have fallen victim to ransomware, you might want to do a little dickering with the hackers.
F-Secure researchers decided to play victim and reached out to the hackers via their online customer support channels and found that three out of four were willing to negotiate a lower ransom price. Plus all four agents were willing to extend the deadline.
The five ransomware families F-Secure studied were: Cerber, Cryptomix, Jigsaw, Shade and TorrentLocker. Cryptomix was the most exorbitant of the five with a ransom demand of three bitcoins, but dropped the ransom by 67 percent down to one bitcoin or about $635.
Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure, said: "Customer service has long been the issue holding ransomware in check. It's never been difficult to infect a computer and go after data in some way. The hard part has been how to communicate with the victim on how to pay in a way that's difficult to trace. Once Bitcoin became popular, ransomware really began to tackle the communication/service issue.”
So should you haggle? “People should absolutely interact and ask questions. If they then get a sense that they can haggle, they should,” said Sullivan. “Haggling over price is practically expected in many parts of the world, and being told ‘no' isn't going to make things worse.”
Source: SCMagazine
F-Secure researchers decided to play victim and reached out to the hackers via their online customer support channels and found that three out of four were willing to negotiate a lower ransom price. Plus all four agents were willing to extend the deadline.The five ransomware families F-Secure studied were: Cerber, Cryptomix, Jigsaw, Shade and TorrentLocker. Cryptomix was the most exorbitant of the five with a ransom demand of three bitcoins, but dropped the ransom by 67 percent down to one bitcoin or about $635.
Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure, said: "Customer service has long been the issue holding ransomware in check. It's never been difficult to infect a computer and go after data in some way. The hard part has been how to communicate with the victim on how to pay in a way that's difficult to trace. Once Bitcoin became popular, ransomware really began to tackle the communication/service issue.”
So should you haggle? “People should absolutely interact and ask questions. If they then get a sense that they can haggle, they should,” said Sullivan. “Haggling over price is practically expected in many parts of the world, and being told ‘no' isn't going to make things worse.”
Source: SCMagazine
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