Reiterating what was said by the FBI in November 2019, Britain’s Home Secretary Priti Patel has urged ransomware victims not to pay up as it encourages Cyber Criminals that their hard work is yielding results financially.
Paying up a ransom to hackers not only encourages crime but also doesn’t guarantee a decryption key in return that is supposed to restore the data access to normalcy.
Speaking at the National Cyber Security Center’s CYBERUK 2021 Virtual Conference, Ms. Priti Patel warned ransomware victims that their payments made to hackers will not get any kind of support from the government. She also stated that once a ransom is paid to hackers, they will return to the infected network again in the future as it seems to them as an earning stream or easy money-making channel.
Ms. Patel was talking in response to a media interaction related to Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack that disrupted the gas supply to certain regions in North America and might also force the oil company to hike up the prices as the supply might not meet the demand for a few coming days.
“What most companies are doing is to fall prey to the attacks again and again. This is wrong”, claims Patel.
As soon as a network gets compromised, the head of the company might take appropriate Cybersecurity measures that such attacks get never be repeated in the future. But only 16% of ransomware victims raise their defense line against ransomware incidents while others are just acting naive to commit the same mistake repeatedly says Priti Patel.
