How My Mom Got Hacked, a real life story about Brooklyn artist who receives a panicked phone call from her mom one day complaining her personal computer has been taken over by some sort of strange encryption. The story unravels the journey Alina Simone and her mom Inna endure in order to restore the files back from the hackers. After the initial shock of the situation sets in the two research their options and realize, as many do, that there is little to no answer as to how to get the files back without paying the hefty $500 ransom fee.
“I thought it was a typical mom rant about hr hardware crashing and having to pay the repair people $500 because her computer crashed.” Like many of us do when our parents call us after a long days work, Alina didnt take her mom seriously. Seeing as it was Thanksgiving weekend, a major snowstorm had just hit, and the ransom deadline was already decreasing to less than a 24 hour bracket, Alina and her mother were frantic. Her mother didn’t make the deadline, and according the the hackers the ransom would double due to this. Inna pleaded with the hackers and they let her off with $500 ransom and all her files. Luckily.
Others, such as the case of the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center that was hacked in early February and had to pay a whooping 40 bitcoin, $17,000 ransom, in order to get their system back on track.
“The value of my personal files and pictures caps off somewhere. But [if] I encrypt the back-end of your corporate system and prevent you from processing payments, that has a tremendous value. And if the hacker can recognize the value of what he has, the ransom can be more dynamically set based on the content of the data.”explains Grayson Milbourne, Security Intelligence Director for Internet security firm Webroot.
From personal to corporate, ransomware is most certainly an eye opening experience to security vulnerabilities.
If you would like to educate yourself in more detail about the information presented in this blog post please visit: The Growing Threat of Ransomware
