Ransomware—A True Story

Ransomware—A True Story

Often we hear about ransomware targeted at organisations who are specifically targeted by gangs to make a profit, pipelines or organisations at the top of the supply chain. However, ransomware is a threat that all businesses face, even SMEs, and often these organisations struggle the most in protecting, responding and recovering from ransomware incidents.

This is a true story about Bugcrowd’s Application Security Engineer, Katie Paxton Fear and the first week at her first job after finishing her degree. She provides a detailed story how her company got hit by ransomware and the difficult decisions some of the most junior members of staff had to make. While the company did have backups, how did they justify/make the case to shut down the entire business for a day or determine to just pay the ransom? Overall, it’s the story of how the security culture failed and how they could have prevented the attack in the first place, by following some simple pieces of advice and how other SMEs can learn from this experience.