Don’t Suck – STOP Paying Ransoms

So, in case you haven’t heard, we have this problem. Yeah, there’s this thing called ransomware, and it’s sort of all over the news.

• The city of Baltimore is being held hostage by ransomware – The good: the city decided not to pay the 13 bitcoin (~$100,000 at the time) ransom. The bad: the city is still reeling, with the attack expected to cost more than $18MM when it’s all said and done.
• Asco Ransomware Attack: Dutch Aircraft Maker Discloses Details – The good: the company doesn’t appear to have paid the criminals; however, there are few details known about the attack. The bad: according to Asco, “activities at all of our sites in Belgium, Canada, the United States and Germany were stopped.”
• 5 More Healthcare Providers Fall Victim to Ransomware Attacks

• • Colorado-based NEO Urology paid a $75,000 ransom
  • Colorado-based Estes Park Health (EPH) – they had an incident response plan, but the insurance company paid the ransom. EPH paid the $10,000 insurance deductible for their ransom payment, but it’s not known how much the attacker’s ransom was.
  • Boston-based ResiDex Software – the ransomware attack was discovered on April 9^th but was only disclosed this past week. ResiDex appears to have restored their systems from backup, not paying the ransom.
  • New York-based Olean Medical Group – they were hit this past week, and it appears they won’t pay the ransom. According to news reports “Olean plans to begin setting up a new system and will work to regain the encrypted records to populate a new computer system, helped by partner healthcare providers.”
  • Seneca Nation Health System – calls their attack a “computer system failure” (the computer system wasn’t what failed, just sayin’). Not sure if there are plans to pay, but the CEO says “We are working feverishly to rebuild our system”.
  • California-based Shingle Springs Health and Wellness Center (SSHWC) – reported that their ransomware attack affects all 21,513 patients, but I don’t think they’re planning to pay the ransom. SSHWC is working to restore their systems by installing new servers and putting workstation upgrades on a “fast track”.

Then there’s this particular attack and response that caught my attention this past week.

The Riviera Beach City Council voted unanimously this week to pay the 65 bitcoin (more than $600,000) ransom.

At what point do we say enough is enough? What’s your excuse for not preparing or planning for a ransomware attack? It’s not like you don’t know that they’re a problem.

What would be your acceptable excuse for not planning for a ransomware attack?

Simple answer. There is no valid excuse. Stop looking for one and stop making sh_t up. If you’re offended, maybe that’s good. It’s the truth. You might have all sorts of excuses that you think are legitimate, but they’re all BS. You’ve run out of excuses. Regardless of being legitimate or not, here are some common ones that people try to pass off:

1. Management support – you couldn’t get management to “buy in” and do the right thing. Sorry, not a valid excuse. Part of your job is to get management buy in, and you failed. If management has their heads so far up their @55, you should find another place to work where they will champion security. To management – get your head out of your @55, you’re not helping your company, your customers, your partners, or anyone else.
2. Priorities – you have so much stuff on your plate, that you couldn’t get around to protecting yourself from ransomware. Hard to fathom how good information stewardship isn’t a top priority. I know you might have a thousand other things too, but ransomware protection should be near the top. If it isn’t, revisit your priorities and get to it.
3. We don’t know how to protect ourselves – take the Ransomware Readiness Assessment that I mention at the end of this post/article or read some self-help articles online (there are hundreds of them).
4. We have insurance – good for you. That’s probably prudent, but it will never make up for your lack of stewardship. When your insurance company pays, we all pay. Insurance companies aren’t in the business of losing money, so they’ll just jack up the rates and everyone will pay more. Simple economics, right?
5. You need help – don’t we all? This isn’t as much of an excuse as it is an admission. It’s an excuse if you don’t do anything about it. There are hundreds of online articles full of good advice, and there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of security professionals that would love to help. Heck, I’m not writing this article for my health. If anything, it’s probably bad for my health (you know, blood pressure and stuff).

Choices

If you get hit with ransomware, you have one of five choices:

1. Take your chances by paying the ransom. This is a terrible choice (read below), but it is a choice nonetheless.
2. Don’t pay the ransom and follow a planned and tested incident response process. Your incident response process should include investigation (looking for the source), containment, and mitigation (at a minimum).
3. Don’t pay the ransom and struggle mightily because you didn’t plan well. Think Baltimore, Atlanta, and hundreds of other organizations that paid hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars in attempted recovery operations.
4. Start over. Only differs from the previous choice because recovery efforts, in terms of data recovery, are no longer on the table.
5. Shut down operations. Sadly, I’ve seen this more than once, and once was too many times.

There is only one good option among the five. That’s option #2, don’t pay because you can recover. You planned, you’re a good steward of the information entrusted to you (at least in this respect), and you serve your organization well.

The other four options are bad ones, but if you didn’t plan well, option #2 is off the table anyway.

The first option was the only one that considered paying the ransom, while the other four options did not. So, if you didn’t plan well, you must decide whether to pay the ransom or not.

Not paying the ransom

You either prepared well, or you didn’t.

• If you did, then kudos to you. You’re more likely to be back up and running within a relatively short period, and your organization owes you a big debt of gratitude.
• If you didn’t, you’re in for a doozy of a response. Get out your checkbook, because it’s probably going to get expensive. It might be so expensive, in fact, that your organization may not survive the ordeal.

The key is planning well! If you didn’t properly protect your data (air-gapped/offline backups, prudent access control, etc.), and if you didn’t plan, you’re a poor steward of the information that’s been entrusted to you. You should slap yourself (hard), update your resume, and maybe find another line of work. People have suffered and/or will suffer because of your poor choices.

Paying the ransom

If you planned (or think you planned), and pay the ransom anyway, take Estes Park Health (noted above) for instance, they claimed to have “incident response program”, but paid the ransom anyway (or their insurance company did).

What’s wrong with this picture?!

Maybe they thought they had planned but didn’t, or the maybe the plan just sucked. If you didn’t plan, or you didn’t plan well, you find yourself in a pickle.

We cited two examples earlier where the organization paid the ransom; Estes Park Health (EPH) and the City of Riviera Beach (FL). It appears from the news reports that one of the two might have had a choice in paying, while the other one did not appear to have a choice.

Estes Park Health (EPH) – the organization was hit by a ransomware attack on June 2^nd. According to their own investigation, there was no data exfiltrated (common). The source of the attack wasn’t disclosed, but it was discovered (allegedly) when an on-call IT technician logged in from home and noticed files encrypting live, while he/she was on the system.

Sounds like just about everything was locked down; phones, network access, imaging files, etc. According to one news report, EPH had an “incident response program”, but determined at some point “the only way to restore the software in the clinic and the only way we were able to restore the imaging and so forth is because our insurance company paid the ransom money and we were able to get the keys to unlock those files.”

No other significant details are available, like the type of ransomware used, how the ransomware got in, how much was paid, or what the “incident response program” called for. Two things are certain:

1. The “incident response program” sucked.
2. The criminals won.

Not only did the insurance company pay the ransom, they paid two ransoms! The insurance company paid two separate ransoms, as EPH discovered more locked files when decrypting its systems.

Riviera Beach City Council – on June 20^th, it was reported that the Riviera Beach City Council voted unanimously to award attackers more than $600,000 for the privilege of accessing their own files. Attackers had broken in three weeks prior, and at some point, locked things up. The attackers held all/most of/some of the data entrusted to the city for ransom. Like most cases, the city had been working with “security consultants”, and it was determined the only way to decrypt the information was to pay the ransom.

The attack began on May 29^th, when an employee at the Riviera Beach police department opened a malicious email. Initially, the city council decided to not pay the ransom, but due to the difficulties in restoring the operations, they eventually opted to pay.

Interesting isn’t it? By proxy, it’s the police paying criminals. Supposedly, the payment is being covered by insurance, but so what?

If you pay the ransom, you suck

People don’t like to be told that they suck, because it sucks to suck. Maybe not sucking will motivate you to change some things and be better.

There are at least four reasons why paying a ransom pisses me off, and why it should piss you off too:

1. You fund future attacks (against me and my friends). What do you think the attackers will do with the money they collect from you? They’ll take some for their own enjoyment, then they’ll funnel the rest into making their future attacks more effective. If you don’t pay, they have no money. Simple, right? If you think this is only about you, you’re selfish. Selfish people suck.
2. It shows that you’re not a good steward. Somebody entrusted you with information, and they deserve better. The information (in most cases) isn’t yours, it belongs to someone else. If you can’t take good care of it, you shouldn’t have it. If you need it to run your business, then maybe you shouldn’t be in business.
3. Attackers win. You might not be as competitive as I am, but you have to admit that it sucks when some jerk beats you at something. If the game was fair and you lost to a good person in a straight-up competition (like chess with a buddy), that wouldn’t be so bad. Here, you lost to a straight up jerk face and there’ll be no gentlemanly handshake at the end. You got taken and you’ll have to just suck it up (or just suck).
4. Money that can’t be used for good. Every dollar we spend on information security is precious. Businesses are in business to make money and/or serve a mission. Money diverted from either one of these two purposes, takes away from your ability to succeed. What could the City of Riviera Beach have done with the $600,000+ if it were spent on something worthwhile. Wouldn’t the taxpayers rather have a nice new community pool, better streets, a few more safety personnel, etc.? Nope.

There are more reasons why we don’t pay ransoms, see what you can come up with yourself.

Now what?

Get to work. Do what you can to protect your organization from a ransomware attack and plan for one if (when) it were to occur.

Don’t know where to start?

Try our free S2SCORE Ransomware Readiness Assessment

There aren’t any strings attached, there isn’t any registration required, and it’s freely distributable through a Creative Commons License (so, share it too!). I whipped this thing up in early 2017 for a bank customer then forgot I had it.

Are there other obstacles in your way?

Identify the obstacles and figure out how to remove them, go around them, go under them, etc.

Need help?

Reach out to any number of us information security people. Many of us will help you, including myself.

Moral of the story is 1) prepare and plan, 2) DO NOT pay ransoms, and 3) we’re all in this together. Good luck!