Generally, law enforcement officials don’t recommend caving in to extortionists. Apparently that rule doesn’t necessarily apply when a police department gets hit with the Cryptolocker malware.
The Swansea, Massachusetts PD recently decided that they weren’tt in a position to ignore Crtyptolocker’s demands. Instead they paid around $750 to retrieve the decryption key and get their files back.
This is exactly why Cryptolocker continues to be a problem. Even people who know better haven’t put themselves in a position to refuse payment.
The Swansea PD needs to take a good, hard look at its backup solution in the wake of this news. Giving in to the Cryptolocker ransomers is only a necessity if you only maintain one good copyof your critical files.
Sure, restoring from a backup means you might lose a revision or two of some files and have to start from scratch on others, but at least it allows you to follow your own advice and not give the criminals exactly what they want.
Source : Geek.com
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