US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

Whilst paying the ransom is often advisable in specific cases like these, it’s absolutely a bad thing for society as a whole. Seeing successes like this will encourage organised crime to keep doing this, as they know there’s gonna be a big reward. It’s like the prisoners dilemma. If people didn’t pay the ransom, there wouldn’t be ransomware. But people don’t take precautions, so they have to pay the ransom, leading to more ransomware... it’s a vicious cycle

So what's the current optimal solution, as far as precautionary measurements go - for these kinds of scenarios?

The more companies that shell out, the more it's going to happen / motivate these pirates to continue with such rackets.

Based on other articles, it appears they didn't hire specialty ransomware consultants for the negotiation but still got a 55% discount. Wonder if they did, if they would have been able to get a better all-in cost.

To be honest, just how bad of a thing is this? It’s a direct financial punishment for a company with lax security practices. It encourages greater security practices.

The money is funnelled to a criminal group, but what difference does it make? Some people consider the USG to be a criminal group; many people are out on the streets for that. My tax dollars directly go to corrupt crooks and nonexistent companies claiming billions for nonexistent PPE.

As a member of society, I don’t care if I’m paying a professional ransomware group, or a professional corruption gang.

For some context about CWT (I was curious about these figures) -- via Wikipedia[1]:

* US$1.5 billion in revenue * 18k employees

For a firm like this, the payment probably amounts to a small uptick in a small portion of their IT budget and won't even come close to hurting them (and, frankly, neither would the $10m figure).

It's insane that this is the case and that companies are willing & able to pay ransoms like this, but the hackers were right - the payment is much less than lost business, bad PR, etc. if the actual information had leaked. Such is where we are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CWT_(company)