Why You Should Never Pay a Ransomware Demand
Paying criminals funds their next attack, and there is no guarantee you get your data back. Explore why technical decryption is always the better route.
GeoHotz Threat Research
Security Advisory Team
The False Promise of Payment
When a company's servers are encrypted by ransomware, the pressure from shareholders and executives to pay the ransom is immense. Hackers promise a swift return to operations, but reality rarely matches their guarantees.
Statistics show that over 30% of companies that pay the ransom either never receive the decryption key, or receive a key that is fundamentally broken and corrupts the data during the unlocking process. Furthermore, paying the ransom immediately places your company on a dark web 'easy target' list for future attacks.
Technical Solutions
Instead of funding criminal syndicates, companies should employ reverse engineering. Many ransomware variants are built by amateur affiliates using leaked builders. These variants often contain cryptographic flaws that allow cybersecurity engineers to crack the encryption locally, without paying the hackers.
Additionally, hackers often fail to properly delete hidden server snapshots or shadow volumes. A thorough forensic investigation can frequently piece together the destroyed databases from these invisible fragments, saving the company millions.
About GeoHotz Threat Research
Our elite team of reverse-engineers and security analysts publish weekly advisories on emerging threats, blockchain exploits, and extortion defense strategies. We monitor the dark web so our clients do not become statistics.