A mattress and furniture store named Best Sleep Centre located in Winnipeg is said to have become a victim of a ransomware attack. Hackers reportedly locked down the database of the store and demanded a cryptocurrency of 0.6 bitcoins or $6000 in Canadian currency in exchange for the decryption key.
David Keam, the owner of the Canada based store confirmed the news and admitted that he obliged to the ransomware demands of the hackers and paid the ransom in bitcoins.
Security experts from all around the world advice ransomware victims not to pay a ransom put forward by the hackers as soon as they lock the access to a database. And that’s because there is no guaranty that the hacker will return with the decryption key as soon as they receive the ransom. Moreover, there’s no guaranty that the hacker will not demand more as soon as he/she receives the first payment.
Keam said that he had no choice but to pay because the cost of building the entire data on the server would not have been worth it.
Most of the ransomware victims these days are opting to pay the hackers rather than to rebuild the data on the infected server.
In fact, at one point of time in the year 2017, the cost of Bitcoin surged to meet the $12,000 mark against USD as corporate heads started to stockpile cryptocurrency to use as ransomware hush money.
Keam is aware of the consequences of paying the ransom to hackers. But the owner of the renowned furniture store isn’t either prepared to build up the locked server from scratch.
