Welcome to the future: US cops pay Bitcoin ransom to end office hostage drama
Blundering cops in Maine, US, have enriched malware masterminds by paying up to decrypt files held hostage by ransomware.
Four city police departments and a sheriff's office in Lincoln County share a common computer network run by Burgess Computer, which hosts the plods' administrative files.
Then one day the entire system was encrypted by the Megacode ransomware, which scrambles documents and demands Bitcoins to decrypt them.
This sort of malware typically scans computers and networks for documents, generates a random encryption key per file, uses those to encrypt the data, and then encrypts the keys using a public-private key pair. Only the crims have the private key needed to unscramble the documents, and it costs money to obtain that, effectively holding the information to ransom. Victims have a few days to pay up before the private key is deleted forever.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/13/us_police_ransomware/
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