Q and A: Ransomware Gangs and Extortion of Hospitals During COVID Pandemic. What Did They Say?

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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ransomware-hunting-team-book-excerpt.html

On a bleak St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, with holiday festivities canceled as COVID-19 swept across the U.S., Lawrence Abrams sent messages to ten of the largest ransomware gangs in the world. Stop attacking hospitals and other medical facilities for the duration of the pandemic, he pleaded. Too many lives were at stake.

As the founder and owner of the most influential news website dedicated to ransomware, Abrams was one of the few people with the connections and credibility to make such a request. His site, BleepingComputer, was one part demilitarized zone, one part neighborhood pub: a place where victims, media, law enforcement, cybersecurity buffs, and criminals all mixed.

Concentrated in countries such as Russia and North Korea, where they appear to enjoy a measure of government protection, the attackers are often self-taught, underemployed tech geeks. When Abrams wrote to them, he appealed to them as ordinary, decent people with parents, children, and partners they loved. How would you feel, he asked, if a member of your family were infected with COVID and couldn’t receive lifesaving treatment because the local hospital was hit by ransomware?

The next morning, Abrams awoke to a flurry of replies. Responding first, the DoppelPaymer gang agreed to his proposal, saying that its members “always try to avoid hospitals, nursing homes … not only now.” If they hit a hospital by mistake, they would “decrypt for free.”

Still, realizing that Abrams would make its pledge public on BleepingComputer, DoppelPaymer warned other victims against posing as health-care providers to avoid paying a ransom: “We’ll do double, triple check before releasing decrypt for free.”

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