University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by oolongCat on Friday June 10, 2016 @03:48AM (#11874854)

Ranked 151-200 in the QS rankings for CS. I bet if they handed this problem over to the CS people in the university they would have willingly helped them out to fix it.

Information security is even listed as one of their main research areas.

http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/cpsc_research

they even have some labs that does infosec

http://icis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/ http://ispia.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/

I bet the people at the CS dept must be pissed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by 21 on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:08AM (#11875529)

You missed this quote under the picture: "University IT workers tried to crack the ransomware for more than a week before the payment".

BTW, are you implying that a strong CS university can break asymmetric encryption? Why is everybody assuming that hackers are stupid all the time, and only they are smart...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by oolongCat on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:22AM (#11875836)

Actually I am implying it is possible for some types of ransomware. Here's an example.

https://github.com/leo-stone/hack-petya

(the hn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474613 )

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by ewams on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:19PM (#11880566)

RSA has some tools to assist with decryption from a few ransomware flavors. I would assume a few of the other big security firms do as well. We did this for a hospital that got hacked. It is not 100% successful and depends on the variant but is possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by jiqiren on Friday June 10, 2016 @04:11AM (#11874966)

Perhaps a student saw an opportunity to get a quick $20,000 discount on their tuition?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:University pays $20,000 to ransomware hackers by shultays on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:20AM (#11875822)

Even if they were ranked first, I doubt that they can do anything against properly encrypted files. As the article states, they already tried and couldn't find a mistake in the encryption

[ Parent | on HN ]