Games get pirated all the time. I’m not sure what the ransom really was doing. So some people get to see the game a little better early right? But where is the downside?
Doxxing the employees is bad of course, but ransom bad?
Yes doxing employees is bad. But if you pay the ransom, there’s no guarantee they’re not going to doxx / sell the information anyway. Or come back again in 6 months or a year and ask for another payment.
People are downvoting you but it is a lose-lose situation for the company. Hence why cybersec professionals try so hard to prevent this from happening.
Pay the ransom:
They might still release data anyway after taking millions from you and may not decrypt your files.
They’ll come back whenever they feel like it demanding more money with the same threat of data release. You’ll be extorted till the company goes over and everyone loses their job.
The now paid hackers are incentivized to continue these acts since it obviously works, this makes the feds angry at you.
Your shareholders, if they exist, are angry because you not only didn’t meet their expectations of data security but now you’ve burned millions on a gamble that the hackers will play nice by decrypting, not releasing, and never coming back.
Don’t pay the ransom:
Hope you have unencrypted backups of all ransomwars encrypted data because the encrypted is now done.
Have to scrub your network to make sure the ingress point is fixed and no remaining infected systems are around to re-encrypt you later.
Your data probably gets released by the hackers causing unknown damage to the company.
Shareholders and customers pissed because you were careless with your network and their data and it most likely gets released.
There’s probably more problems I’m not thinking of, it’s early here and I’m sleep deprived from finishing my two week on-call cycle yesterday
Pre-release built’s leak and other information can harm early sales, preorders, if this game is a buggy mess at that point - that won’t be true at the set date - but it still harms it’s perception. There’s much creative and business control to lose. Especially since they announced Insomniac’s release dates for the next decade the can’t now be walk back as easily.
Paying a ransom would be stupid, but it’s still some harm in disclosing info they weren’t ready to release.
Games get pirated all the time. I’m not sure what the ransom really was doing. So some people get to see the game a little better early right? But where is the downside?
Doxxing the employees is bad of course, but ransom bad?
Doxxing employees is bad, real bad
Thanks for the down vote!
Yes doxing employees is bad. But if you pay the ransom, there’s no guarantee they’re not going to doxx / sell the information anyway. Or come back again in 6 months or a year and ask for another payment.
People are downvoting you but it is a lose-lose situation for the company. Hence why cybersec professionals try so hard to prevent this from happening.
Pay the ransom: They might still release data anyway after taking millions from you and may not decrypt your files.
They’ll come back whenever they feel like it demanding more money with the same threat of data release. You’ll be extorted till the company goes over and everyone loses their job.
The now paid hackers are incentivized to continue these acts since it obviously works, this makes the feds angry at you.
Your shareholders, if they exist, are angry because you not only didn’t meet their expectations of data security but now you’ve burned millions on a gamble that the hackers will play nice by decrypting, not releasing, and never coming back.
Don’t pay the ransom:
Hope you have unencrypted backups of all ransomwars encrypted data because the encrypted is now done.
Have to scrub your network to make sure the ingress point is fixed and no remaining infected systems are around to re-encrypt you later.
Your data probably gets released by the hackers causing unknown damage to the company.
Shareholders and customers pissed because you were careless with your network and their data and it most likely gets released.
There’s probably more problems I’m not thinking of, it’s early here and I’m sleep deprived from finishing my two week on-call cycle yesterday
Pre-release built’s leak and other information can harm early sales, preorders, if this game is a buggy mess at that point - that won’t be true at the set date - but it still harms it’s perception. There’s much creative and business control to lose. Especially since they announced Insomniac’s release dates for the next decade the can’t now be walk back as easily.
Paying a ransom would be stupid, but it’s still some harm in disclosing info they weren’t ready to release.