
Los Angeles hospital paid $17,000 in Bitcoin to ransomware hackers - bennettfeely
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/los-angeles-hospital-hacked-ransom-bitcoin-hollywood-presbyterian-medical-center?CMP=twt_gu
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viraptor
This article misses three very important things.

1\. The IT staff really messed up by not having backups available. I wouldn't
be surprised if anyone making that decision was fired now.

2\. They got lucky - if the data loss was due to hardware failure / fire /
flood / ..., they couldn't pay anyone. That $17k is literally the price for a
real data recovery drill and they know they failed it.

3\. Again, nobody mentions that people can trivially avoid this issue by using
backups. (Online, offline, whatever - as long as it's not mounted as a normal
filesystem)

~~~
chopin
I regularly back up to shares. I'd expect that these are not safe, either. For
this very reason I do regular backups of the backup (on the NAS, which is a
Linux box). These backups can only be seen as read-only share (and are not
advertized).

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yitchelle
As an aside, Radiolab recently did a podcast on Darkode and the way Ransomware
affects the lives of everyday folks.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/darkode/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/darkode/)

It was interesting.

