IT Professionals, Guilty

Just under 20 million dollars.

$19,999,000 to be precise.

An absolute no brainer to pay up so.

But it was in bitcoin no? Bitcoin at the time valued 20 million but would have been 12 million at yesterday price

The chat suggests they haven’t paid it.

They wouldn’t be communicating outside of the chat.

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Vlad must have agreed a smaller slice for himself to get the deal over the line

Doesn’t specify Bitcoin but you’d assume that’s what they want.

Although If they want 20 million worth of Bonfire that’s ok too.

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You can trade it fir some government bonds. Ireland never burns bondholders. Pension sorted

They’ve promised Putin planning permission for the Embassy extension. Jonny Ronan should get into the hacking game.

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They were definitely leaned on. No way would they willing put in a chat, that they know would be made public, that they were giving the decryption tool out for free.

I have heard of US companies that do exactly this. Buy the dips in Bitcoin to have ransom funds available at a discount if required for a later date.

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Clever move

That works if they expect Bitcoin to go up. If so, why don’t they buy more and just sel it for profits🤷‍♂️

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I’d say Putin did Paddy a favour here and told the lads to ease off the Micks are broke and their leader looks like a but of a light weight

Assume private companies would be more likely to pay ransom in similar situation?

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Well that’s the point, if you don’t ever need it should still have a value. The equivalent of putting in a very volatile savings account.

That’s what I reckon as well. We’re small fish but sometimes it’s the small stuff that can bring you down. A ha’penny country on the verge of the Atlantic isn’t worth the potential hassle

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They are paying out every day.
The power brokers won’t waste political capital at either the victim or attacker end for a private company.

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@TreatyStones is it not a complete failure of the HSE defences that one comprimised computer could access the whole network? With 100k people working in the HSE you’d imagine there must be a hundred clicks on dodgy links a month. Relying on people not to click on something dangerous seems a fairly slim defence. Or is there something absolutely genius about this that means it can’t be stopped

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It’s lucky we have private hospitals or we’d not have a functioning health system for the next four or five weeks.

Hospitals not knowing what drugs patients are on is scary stuff.

I’d be amazed if the entire network across all of the HSE was infected, but given these lads were in a portion of the network for at least two weeks they probably have no idea of how far they managed to get. They would have been moving from server to server, running tools to map out host names and IP addresses etc and dropping payloads. These lads are pros. They’d comfortably be earning good six figure salaries in the private sector.

But yes, the report on what exactly was clicked, how did the person have admin rights to run it on their machine etc will be interesting.