HELD FOR RANSOM - Colonial Pipeline and U.S. Infrastructure

"The Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Hackers Had a Secret Weapon: Self-Promoting Cybersecurity Firms" by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, ProPublica 5/24/2021

This story was co-published with MIT Technology Review.

On Jan 11, antivirus company Bitdefender said it was “happy to announce” a startling breakthrough.  It had found a flaw in the ransomware that a gang known as DarkSide was using to freeze computer networks of dozens of businesses in the U.S. and Europe.  Companies facing demands from DarkSide could download a free tool from Bitdefender and avoid paying millions of dollars in ransom to the hackers.

But Bitdefender wasn’t the first to identify this flaw.  Two other researchers, Fabian Wosar and Michael Gillespie, had noticed it the month before and had begun discreetly looking for victims to help.  By publicizing its tool, Bitdefender alerted DarkSide to the lapse, which involved reusing the same digital keys to lock and unlock multiple victims.  The next day, DarkSide declared that it had repaired the problem, and that “new companies have nothing to hope for.”

“Special thanks to BitDefender for helping fix our issues,” DarkSide said.  “This will make us even better.”

DarkSide soon proved it wasn’t bluffing, unleashing a string of attacks.  This month, it paralyzed the Colonial Pipeline Co., prompting a shutdown of the 5,500 mile pipeline that carries 45% of the fuel used on the East Coast, quickly followed by a rise in gasoline prices, panic buying of gas across the Southeast and closures of thousands of gas stations.  Absent Bitdefender’s announcement, it’s possible that the crisis might have been contained, and that Colonial might have quietly restored its system with Wosar and Gillespie’s decryption tool.

Instead, Colonial paid DarkSide $4.4 million in Bitcoin for a key to unlock its files.  “I will admit that I wasn’t comfortable seeing money go out the door to people like this,” CEO Joseph Blount told The Wall Street Journal.

The missed opportunity was part of a broader pattern of botched or half-hearted responses to the growing menace of ransomware, which during the pandemic has disabled businesses, schools, hospitals and government agencies across the country.  The incident also shows how antivirus companies eager to make a name for themselves sometimes violate one of the cardinal rules of the cat-and-mouse game of cyber-warfare: Don’t let your opponents know what you’ve figured out.  During World War II, when the British secret service learned from decrypted communications that the Gestapo was planning to abduct and murder a valuable double agent, Johnny Jebsen, his handler wasn’t allowed to warn him for fear of cluing in the enemy that its cipher had been cracked.  Today, ransomware hunters like Wosar and Gillespie try to prolong the attackers’ ignorance, even at the cost of contacting fewer victims.  Sooner or later, as payments drop off, the cybercriminals realize that something has gone wrong.

Whether to tout a decryption tool is a “calculated decision,” said Rob McLeod, senior director of the threat response unit for cybersecurity firm eSentire.  From the marketing perspective, “You are singing that song from the rooftops about how you have come up with a security solution that will decrypt a victim’s data.  And then the security researcher angle says, ‘Don’t disclose any information here.  Keep the ransomware bugs that we’ve found that allow us to decode the data secret, so as not to notify the threat actors.’”

Wosar said that publicly releasing tools, as Bitdefender did, has become riskier as ransoms have soared and the gangs have grown wealthier and more technically adept.  In the early days of ransomware, when hackers froze home computers for a few hundred dollars, they often couldn’t determine how their code was broken unless the flaw was specifically pointed out to them.

Today, the creators of ransomware “have access to reverse engineers and penetration testers who are very very capable,” he said.  “That’s how they gain entrance to these oftentimes highly secured networks in the first place.  They download the decryptor, they disassemble it, they reverse engineer it and they figure out exactly why we were able to decrypt their files.  And 24 hours later, the whole thing is fixed.  Bitdefender should have known better.”

It wasn’t the first time that Bitdefender trumpeted a solution that Wosar or Gillespie had beaten it to.  Gillespie had broken the code of a ransomware strain called GoGoogle and was helping victims without any fanfare, when Bitdefender released a decryption tool in May 2020.  Other companies have also announced breakthroughs publicly, Wosar and Gillespie said.

“People are desperate for a news mention, and big security companies don’t care about victims,” Wosar said.

Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research at Bucharest, Romania-based Bitdefender, said the company wasn’t aware of the earlier success in unlocking files infected by DarkSide.  Regardless, he said, Bitdefender decided to publish its tool “because most victims who fall for ransomware do not have the right connection with ransomware support groups and won’t know where to ask for help unless they can learn about the existence of tools from media reports or with a simple search.”

Bitdefender has provided free technical support to more than a dozen DarkSide victims, and “we believe many others have successfully used the tool without our intervention,” Botezatu said.  Over the years, Bitdefender has helped individuals and businesses avoid paying more than $100 million in ransom, he said.

Bitdefender recognized that DarkSide might correct the flaw, Botezatu said.  “We are well aware that attackers are agile and adapt to our decryptors.”  But DarkSide might have “spotted the issue” anyway.  “We don’t believe in ransomware decryptors made silently available.  Attackers will learn about their existence by impersonating home users or companies in need, while the vast majority of victims will have no idea that they can get their data back for free.”

The attack on Colonial Pipeline, and the ensuing chaos at the gas pumps throughout the Southeast, appears to have spurred the federal government to be more vigilant.  President Joe Biden issued an executive order to improve cybersecurity and create a blueprint for a federal response to cyberattacks.  DarkSide said it was shutting down under U.S. pressure, although ransomware crews have often disbanded to avoid scrutiny and then re-formed under new names, or their members have launched or joined other groups.

“As sophisticated as they are, these guys will pop up again, and they’ll be that much smarter,” said Aaron Tantleff, a Chicago cybersecurity attorney who has consulted with 10 companies attacked by DarkSide.  “They’ll come back with a vengeance.”

At least until now, private researchers and companies have often been more effective than the government in fighting ransomware.  Last October, Microsoft disrupted the infrastructure of Trickbot, a network of more than 1 million infected computers that disseminated the notorious Ryuk strain of ransomware, by disabling its servers and communications.  That month, ProtonMail, the Swiss-based email service, shut down 20,000 Ryuk-related accounts.

Wosar and Gillespie, who belong to a worldwide volunteer group called the Ransomware Hunting Team, have cracked more than 300 major ransomware strains and variants, saving an estimated 4 million victims from paying billions of dollars.

By contrast, the FBI rarely decrypts ransomware or arrests the attackers, who are typically based in countries like Russia or Iran that lack extradition agreements with the U.S.  DarkSide, for instance, is believed to operate out of Russia.  Far more victims seek help from the Hunting Team, through websites maintained by its members, than from the FBI.

The U.S. Secret Service also investigates ransomware, which falls under its purview of combating financial crimes.  But, especially in election years, it sometimes rotates agents off cyber assignments to carry out its better-known mission of protecting Presidents, Vice Presidents, major party candidates and their families.  European law enforcement, especially the Dutch National Police, has been more successful than the U.S. in arresting attackers and seizing servers.

Similarly, the U.S. government has made only modest headway in pushing private industry, including pipeline companies, to strengthen cybersecurity defenses.  Cybersecurity oversight is divided among an alphabet soup of agencies, hampering coordination.  The Department of Homeland Security conducts “vulnerability assessments” for critical infrastructure, which includes pipelines.

It reviewed Colonial Pipeline in around 2013 as part of a study of places where a cyberattack might cause a catastrophe.  The pipeline was deemed resilient, meaning that it could recover quickly, according to a former DHS official.  The department did not respond to questions about any subsequent reviews.

Five years later, DHS created a pipeline cybersecurity initiative to identify weaknesses in pipeline computer systems and recommend strategies to address them.  Participation is voluntary, and a person familiar with the initiative said that it is more useful for smaller companies with limited in-house IT expertise than for big ones like Colonial.  The National Risk Management Center, which oversees the initiative, also grapples with other thorny issues such as election security.

Ransomware has skyrocketed since 2012, when the advent of Bitcoin made it hard to track or block payments.  The criminals’ tactics have evolved from indiscriminate “spray and pray” campaigns seeking a few hundred dollars apiece to targeting specific businesses, government agencies and nonprofit groups with multimillion-dollar demands.

Attacks on energy businesses in particular have increased during the pandemic — not just in the U.S. but in Canada, Latin America and Europe.  As the companies allowed employees to work from home, they relaxed some security controls, McLeod said.

Since 2019, numerous gangs have ratcheted up pressure with a technique known as “double extortion.”  Upon entering a system, they steal sensitive data before launching ransomware that encodes the files and makes it impossible for hospitals, universities and cities to do their daily work.  If the loss of computer access is not sufficiently intimidating, they threaten to reveal confidential information, often posting samples as leverage.  For instance, when the Washington, D.C., police department didn’t pay the $4 million ransom demanded by a gang called Babuk last month, Babuk published intelligence briefings, names of criminal suspects and witnesses, and personnel files, from medical information to polygraph test results, of officers and job candidates.

DarkSide, which emerged last August, epitomized this new breed.  It chose targets based on a careful financial analysis or information gleaned from corporate emails.  For instance, it attacked one of Tantleff’s clients during a week when the hackers knew the company would be vulnerable because it was transitioning its files to the cloud and didn’t have clean backups.

To infiltrate target networks, the gang used advanced methods such as “zero-day exploits” that immediately take advantage of software vulnerabilities before they can be patched.  Once inside, it moved swiftly, looking not only for sensitive data but also for the victim’s cyber insurance policy, so it could peg its demands to the amount of coverage.  After two to three days of poking around, DarkSide encrypted the files.

“They have a faster attack window,” said Christopher Ballod, associate managing director for cyber risk at Kroll, the business investigations firm, who has advised half a dozen DarkSide victims.  “The longer you dwell in the system, the more likely you are to be caught.”

Typically, DarkSide’s demands were “on the high end of the scale,” $5 million and up, Ballod said.  One scary tactic: If publicly traded companies didn’t pay the ransom, DarkSide threatened to share information stolen from them with short-sellers who would profit if the share price dropped upon publication.

DarkSide’s site on the dark web identified dozens of victims and described the confidential data it claimed to have filched from them.  One was New Orleans law firm Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann.  “A big annoyance is what it was,” attorney Phil Wittmann said, referring to the DarkSide attack in February.  “We paid them nothing,” said Michael Walshe Jr., chair of the firm’s management committee, declining to comment further.

Last November, DarkSide adopted what is known as a “ransomware-as-a-service” model.  Under this model, it partnered with affiliates who launched the attacks.  The affiliates received 75% to 90% of the ransom, with DarkSide keeping the remainder.  As this partnership suggests, the ransomware ecosystem is a distorted mirror of corporate culture, with everything from job interviews to procedures for handling disputes.  After DarkSide shut down, several people who identified themselves as its affiliates complained on a dispute resolution forum that it had stiffed them.  “The target paid, but I did not receive my share,” one wrote.

Together, DarkSide and its affiliates reportedly grossed at least $90 million.  Seven of Tantleff’s clients, including two companies in the energy industry, paid ransoms ranging from $1.25 million to $6 million, reflecting negotiated discounts from initial demands of $7.5 million to $30 million.  His other three clients hit by DarkSide did not pay.  In one of those cases, the hackers demanded $50 million.  Negotiations grew acrimonious, and the two sides couldn’t agree on a price.

DarkSide’s representatives were shrewd bargainers, Tantleff said.  If a victim said it couldn’t afford the ransom because of the pandemic, DarkSide was ready with data showing that the company’s revenue was up, or that COVID-19’s impact was factored into the price.

DarkSide’s grasp of geopolitics was less advanced than its approach to ransomware.  Around the same time that it adopted the affiliate model, it posted that it was planning to safeguard information stolen from victims by storing it in servers in Iran.  DarkSide apparently didn’t realize that an Iranian connection would complicate its collection of ransoms from victims in the U.S., which has economic sanctions restricting financial transactions with Iran.  Although DarkSide later walked back this statement, saying that it had only considered Iran as a possible location, numerous cyber insurers had concerns about covering payments to the group.  Coveware, a Connecticut firm that negotiates with attackers on behalf of victims, stopped dealing with DarkSide.

Ballod said that, with their insurers unwilling to reimburse the ransom, none of his clients paid DarkSide, despite concerns about exposure of their data.  Even if they had caved in to DarkSide, and received assurances from the hackers in return that the data would be shredded, the information might still leak, he said.

During DarkSide’s changeover to the affiliate model, a flaw was introduced into its ransomware.  The vulnerability caught the attention of members of the Ransomware Hunting Team.  Established in 2016, the invitation-only team consists of about a dozen volunteers in the U.S., Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary and the U.K.  They work in cybersecurity or related fields.  In their spare time, they collaborate in finding and decrypting new ransomware strains.

Several members, including Wosar, have little formal education but an aptitude for coding.  A high school dropout, Wosar grew up in a working-class family near the German port city of Rostock.  In 1992, at the age of 8, he saw a computer for the first time and was entranced.  By 16, he was developing his own antivirus software and making money from it.  Now 37, he has worked for antivirus firm Emsisoft since its inception almost two decades ago and is its chief technology officer.  He moved to the U.K. from Germany in 2018 and lives near London.

He has been battling ransomware hackers since 2012, when he cracked a strain called ACCDFISA, which stood for “Anti Cyber Crime Department of Federal Internet Security Agency.”  This fictional agency was notifying people that child pornography had infected their computers, and so it was blocking access to their files unless they paid $100 to remove the virus.

The ACCDFISA hacker eventually noticed that the strain had been decrypted and released a revised version.  Many of Wosar’s subsequent triumphs were also fleeting.  He and his teammates tried to keep criminals blissfully unaware for as long as possible that their strain was vulnerable.  They left cryptic messages on forums inviting victims to contact them for assistance or sent direct messages to people who posted that they had been attacked.

In the course of protecting against computer intrusions, analysts at antivirus firms sometimes detected ransomware flaws and built decryption tools, though it wasn’t their main focus.  Sometimes they collided with Wosar.

In 2014, Wosar discovered that a ransomware strain called CryptoDefense copied and pasted from Microsoft Windows some of the code it used to lock and unlock files, not realizing that the same code was preserved in a folder on the victim’s own computer.  It was missing the signal, or “flag,” in their program, usually included by ransomware creators to instruct Windows not to save a copy of the key.

Wosar quickly developed a decryption tool to retrieve the key.  “We faced an interesting conundrum,” Sarah White, another Hunting Team member, wrote on Emsisoft’s blog.  “How to get our tool out to the most victims possible without alerting the malware developer of his mistake?”

Wosar discreetly sought out CryptoDefense victims through support forums, volunteer networks and announcements of where to contact for help.  He avoided describing how the tool worked or the blunder it exploited.  When victims came forward, he supplied the fix, scrubbing the ransomware from at least 350 computers.  CryptoDefense eventually “caught on to us ... but he still did not have access to the decrypter we used and had no idea how we were unlocking his victims’ files,” White wrote.

But then an antivirus company, Symantec, uncovered the same problem and bragged about the discovery on a blog post that “contained enough information to help the CryptoDefense developer find and correct the flaw,” White wrote.  Within 24 hours the attackers began spreading a revised version.  They changed its name to CryptoWall and made $325 million.

Symantec “chose quick publicity over helping CryptoDefense victims recover their files,” White wrote.  “Sometimes there are things that are better left unsaid.”

A spokeswoman for Broadcom, which acquired Symantec’s enterprise security business in 2019, declined to comment, saying that “the team members who worked on the tool are no longer with the company.”

Like Wosar, the 29-year-old Gillespie comes from poverty and never went to college.  When he was growing up in central Illinois, his family struggled so much financially that they sometimes had to move in with friends or relatives.  After high school, he worked full time for 10 years at a computer repair chain called Nerds on Call.  Last year, he became a malware and cybersecurity researcher at Coveware.

Last December, he messaged Wosar for help.  Gillespie had been working with a DarkSide victim who had paid a ransom and received a tool to recover the data.  But DarkSide’s decryptor had a reputation for being slow, and the victim hoped that Gillespie could speed up the process.

Gillespie analyzed the software, which contained a key to release the files.  He wanted to extract the key, but because it was stored in an unusually complex way, he couldn’t.  He turned to Wosar, who was able to isolate it.

The teammates then began testing the key on other files infected by DarkSide.  Gillespie checked files uploaded by victims to the website he operates, ID Ransomware, while Wosar used VirusTotal, an online database of suspected malware.

That night, they shared a discovery.

“I have confirmation DarkSide is re-using their RSA keys,” Gillespie wrote to the Hunting Team on its Slack channel.  A type of cryptography, RSA generates two keys: a public key to encode data and a private key to decipher it.  RSA is used legitimately to safeguard many aspects of e-commerce, such as protecting credit numbers.  But it’s also been co-opted by ransomware hackers.

“I noticed the same as I was able to decrypt newly encrypted files using their decrypter,” Wosar replied less than an hour later, at 2:45 a.m. London time.

Their analysis showed that, before adopting the affiliate model, DarkSide had used a different public and private key for each victim.  Wosar suspected that, during this transition, DarkSide introduced a mistake into its affiliate portal used to generate the ransomware for each target.  Wosar and Gillespie could now use the key that Wosar had extracted to retrieve files from Windows machines seized by DarkSide.  The cryptographic blunder didn’t affect Linux operating systems.

“We were scratching our heads,” Wosar said.  “Could they really have fucked up this badly? DarkSide was one of the more professional ransomware-as-a-service schemes out there.  For them to make such a huge mistake is very, very rare.”

The Hunting Team celebrated quietly, without seeking publicity.  White, who is a computer science student at Royal Holloway, part of the University of London, began looking for DarkSide victims.  She contacted firms that handle digital forensics and incident response.

“We told them, ‘Hey listen, if you have any DarkSide victims, tell them to reach out to us, we can help them.  We can recover their files and they don’t have to pay a huge ransom,’” Wosar said.

The DarkSide hackers mostly took the Christmas season off.  Gillespie and Wosar expected that, when the attacks resumed in the new year, their discovery would help dozens of victims.  But then Bitdefender published its post, under the headline “Darkside Ransomware Decryption Tool.”

In a messaging channel with the ransomware response community, someone asked why Bitdefender would tip off the hackers.  “Publicity,” White responded.  “Looks good.  I can guarantee they’ll fix it much faster now though.”

She was right.  The next day, DarkSide acknowledged the error that Wosar and Gillespie had found before Bitdefender.  “Due to the problem with key generation, some companies have the same keys,” the hackers wrote, adding that up to 40% of keys were affected.

DarkSide mocked Bitdefender for releasing the decryptor at “the wrong time…., as the activity of us and our partners during the New Year holidays is the lowest.”

Adding to the team’s frustrations, Wosar discovered that the Bitdefender tool had its own drawbacks.  Using the company’s decryptor, he tried to unlock samples infected by DarkSide and found that they were damaged in the process.  “They actually implemented the decryption wrong,” Wosar said.  “That means if victims did use the Bitdefender tool, there’s a good chance that they damaged the data.”

Asked about Wosar’s criticism, Botezatu said that data recovery is difficult, and that Bitdefender has “taken all precautions to make sure that we’re not compromising user data” including exhaustive testing and “code that evaluates whether the resulting decrypted file is valid.”

Even without Bitdefender, DarkSide might have soon realized its mistake anyway, Wosar and Gillespie said.  For example, as they sifted through compromised networks, the hackers might have come across emails in which victims helped by the Hunting Team discussed the flaw.

“They might figure it out that way — that is always a possibility,” Wosar said.  “But it’s especially painful if a vulnerability is being burned through something stupid like this.”

The incident led the Hunting Team to coin a term for the premature exposure of a weakness in a ransomware strain.  “Internally, we often joke, ‘Yeah, they are probably going to pull a Bitdefender,’” Wosar said.

SECURITY - Ransomware Hunting League Hero

"The Ransomware Superhero of Normal, Illinois" by Renee Dudley, ProPublica 10/28/2019

Thanks to Michael Gillespie, an obscure programmer at a Nerds on Call repair store, hundreds of thousands of ransomware victims have recovered their files for free.

This story was co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times and The Pantagraph.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.  Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

About 10 years ago, Michael Gillespie and several classmates at Pekin Community High School in central Illinois were clicking on links on the school’s website when they discovered a weakness that exposed sensitive information such as students’ Social Security numbers.  They quickly alerted their computer repair and networking teacher, Eric McCann.

“It was a vulnerability that nobody even knew about,” McCann said.  “They did a quick search on passwords and student accounts, and lo and behold, that file is sitting out there.”

A shy, skinny teenager whose hand-me-down clothes didn’t fit him, and who was often ridiculed by schoolmates, Gillespie was already working after school as a computer technician.  “He was full of information all the time,” McCann said.  “We’d bounce ideas off each other.  You could tell his passion for technology, for computers, for figuring out things.  That definitely made him stand out.”

Without crediting the students, school administrators closed the breach and changed everyone’s passwords.  Gillespie’s anonymous protection of the school’s cyberdefenses was a harbinger of his future.  Like a real-life version of Clark Kent or Peter Parker, the self-effacing Gillespie morphs in his spare time into a crime-foiling superhero.  A cancer survivor who works at a Nerds on Call computer repair shop and has been overwhelmed by debt — he and his wife had a car repossessed and their home nearly foreclosed on — the 27-year-old Gillespie has become, with little fanfare or reward, one of the world’s leading conquerors of an especially common and virulent cybercrime: ransomware.  Asked what motivates him, he replied, “I guess it’s just the affinity for challenge and feeling like I am contributing to beating the bad guys.”

Each year, millions of ransomware attacks paralyze computer systems of individuals, businesses, hospitals and medical offices, government agencies, and even police departments.  Often, files cannot be decrypted without paying a ransom, and victims who haven’t saved backup copies and want to retrieve the information have little choice but to pony up.  But those who have recovered their data without enriching criminals frequently owe their escapes to Gillespie.

The FBI and local law enforcement agencies have had little success in curbing ransomware.  Local departments lack the resources to solve cybercrime, and the ransoms demanded have often been below the threshold that triggers federal investigations.  Security researchers like Gillespie have done their best to fill the gap.  There are almost 800 known types of ransomware, and Gillespie, mostly by himself but sometimes collaborating with other ransomware hunters, has cracked more than 100 of them.  Hundreds of thousands of victims have downloaded his decryption tools for free, potentially saving them from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom.

“He took that deep dive into the technical stuff, and he just thrives on it,” said Lawrence Abrams, founder of a ransomware assistance website called BleepingComputer.com.  “Every time a new ransomware comes out, he checks it out.  ‘Can it be decrypted?  Yes, it can be decrypted.  OK, I’ll make the decryptor.’  And it’s just nonstop.  He just keeps pumping them out.”

Gillespie downplays his accomplishments.  “IT [Internet Technology] moves so fast, there’s always something to learn, and there’s always someone better than you,” he said.

Gillespie’s tools are available on BleepingComputer.com, and they can be accessed through a site he created and operates, called ID Ransomware.  There, victims submit about 2,000 ransomware-stricken files every day to find out which strain has hit them and to obtain an antidote, if one exists.

As hackers and their corporate enablers, including cyber insurance providers and data recovery firms whose business models are based on paying ransoms, profit directly or indirectly from cybercrime, one of ransomware’s greatest foes lives paycheck-to-paycheck.  Under his internet alias, demonslay335, Gillespie tackles ransomware either in his downtime at Nerds on Call or at night in the two-story bungalow he shares with his wife, Morgan, and their dog, rabbit and eight cats.  Surrounded by pets, he lies on his living room couch, decoding ransomware on his laptop and corresponding with victims desperate for his help.

Although the FBI honored him in 2017 with an award for his website, it doesn’t systematically recommend ID Ransomware — meaning that some victims may never learn of a resource that could help them avoid paying a ransom.  Many of his friends, relatives and colleagues don’t know the extent of his war on ransomware.  “They do not have a clue because of Michael’s modesty,” said his wife’s grandmother, Rita Blanch.  “Honestly, I don’t think anyone in the family knows what he does for free.  I barely know.”  When he got the FBI award, she added, “I sent out a family text, and they’re like: ‘What?  What?  Our Michael?’”

McCann wasn’t aware of Gillespie’s accomplishments either.  “It kind of gives me goosebumps,” the teacher said.  “He’s sitting here doing all this for free.  That’s incredible.”

On a humid morning in July, Gillespie sat on his covered front porch.  His hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, and he sported scraggly facial hair and a V-neck striped shirt.  Brown leaves left over from the previous autumn and birdseed from a feeder were scattered on the ground.  Gillespie said hello to a cardinal — the Illinois state bird, he pointed out — and a squirrel with a “wonky eye.”  He said a family of groundhogs resides under the porch and eats from the front-yard mulberry tree, but they didn’t make an appearance.

He opened his Twitter account.  “Like right now, I have 58 PMs and 120 notifications,” he said.  Most were pleas for help from victims of a ransomware strain, STOP Djvu, which he can sometimes decrypt.

Gillespie’s love of computers and electronics started early.  His paternal grandmother, a video gamer, introduced him to online role-playing games such as RuneScape.  He played Donkey Kong Country on a used Super Nintendo that his uncle gave him.  As emergency services volunteers, his parents communicated with tornado spotters via ham radios.  His father, a land surveyor, taught him how to repair electronics by soldering the radios.

Gillespie gleaned from his mother’s father, a police lieutenant in Florida, the importance of protecting the public.  Reinforcing the message, his parents went out of their way on family trips to pass through Metropolis, Illinois, which proclaims itself to be Superman’s hometown, and pay their respects at the Man of Steel’s bronze statue.  Gillespie was also fascinated by cryptography.  He liked the idea of having secret codes that no one else could figure out — and cracking other people’s.

Struggling financially, his family sometimes had to move in with friends or relatives.  When he was in high school, his parents filed for bankruptcy in the Central District of Illinois, court documents show.

At Pekin High, he helped protect not only the website but also his classmates’ belongings.  One day, noticing that other students were pre-setting codes to the combination locks on their lockers for convenience, he pulled down on every lock in his aisle.  About a quarter of the lockers opened.  He left a Post-it note in each one, admonishing the user to be more careful.

By then, he and Morgan Blanch were becoming close.  They lived down the street from each other but didn’t become friends until their freshman year at Pekin.  They began hanging out at each other’s houses and messaging on Myspace.  They were both in the school show choir and eventually sang in a national competition on the Grand Ole Opry stage in Nashville, Tennessee.

Both sometimes felt like outcasts.  She was overweight.  Gillespie, she said, was “that one kid at school that everybody knows who they are because they’re weird or they’re the butt of people’s jokes.”

But they could rely on each other.  “We’d get annoyed because our other friends were more flighty,” she said.  “They weren’t dependable, whereas if Michael and I made a plan, we stuck to it.  And we liked that about each other.” They started dating during Christmas break of their junior year.

When he graduated in 2010, Gillespie was named a Prairie State Scholar and an Illinois State Scholar, based on his standardized test scores and class rank.  Instead of going to college, he began working full time at the Nerds on Call store in Normal, Illinois.  Even with financial aid, he said, college would have been too expensive, and he already had everything he wanted.  “I got a job, got a car, got a girlfriend.  Boom.  Life together,” he said.

“He just felt that he could learn better on his own than in a classroom setting,” Morgan Gillespie said.  “He doesn’t really like to be restrained by protocol or by doing the ‘typical’ route of things.  He likes to get in there and figure it out and do whatever it is he feels like he wants to do.”

She enrolled at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, but missed Gillespie and dropped out after two months.  They moved into a new apartment close to his job and were married in October 2012, with Rita Blanch officiating.  For the bachelor party, Gillespie and his Nerds on Call friends went to a nearby farm and shot up old computers with his father’s firearms.  “Nobody who was too tipsy got to hold the rifles, but we put a few rounds through some old monitors,” said his best man, former co-worker David Jacobs, who organized the party.

The couple honeymooned in Peoria, Illinois.  The next year, with a Federal Housing Administration loan for lower-income borrowers, they purchased their $116,000 bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in Bloomington, Illinois.  There they could hear Amtrak’s Lincoln Service roar by on its way to Chicago.

At Nerds on Call, Gillespie was known as the Swiss Army Knife for his versatility.  So when a client was hit by TeslaCrypt ransomware in 2015, Gillespie was assigned to recover the files.

He embraced the task.  Not only was it an opportunity to expand his skills, but he also objected to the very idea of paying a ransom.  “I say hell no,” he said.  “There’s all the stuff about how it’s funding terrorism, funding bad stuff.  But more so, it’s just encouraging [criminals] to keep going.”

Gillespie “lives so heavily in the tech world, I think having bad actors involved just bothers him,” Jacobs said.  “Sometimes it’s also a little bit of competition.  ‘It’s me versus the bad guys and I want to win.  I want to be able to outdo their schemes.’”

Gillespie immediately consulted BleepingComputer.com.  Established in 2004 by Abrams to provide free advice for any computer problem through tutorials and forums, it had become the go-to site for ransomware assistance.

Sure enough, a BleepingComputer member known as BloodDolly had figured out how to crack TeslaCrypt.  But Gillespie still had to create a key for the client, which required running complex software for hours or days at a time.  “I wanted to post a success story for one of my customer’s systems that was hit this week,” he proudly announced on the forum in August 2015.  “I’ve just successfully decoded a few sample files at home.  … My customer is going to be thrilled we can get her photos back.”

Gillespie realized that Abrams, BloodDolly and other ransomware researchers were overwhelmed with requests for help.  He soaked up everything they could teach him.  Soon he was running software from both his home computer and computers under his desk at work, generating customized keys for scores of TeslaCrypt victims who had posted on BleepingComputer or on social media.

“It was huge, it was insane,” Abrams recalled.  “We were cracking keys left and right.  And Michael got the bug from that.  He came to the site, started cracking keys, starting helping.”

Gillespie also began exchanging private messages on BleepingComputer with U.K.-based ransomware expert Fabian Wosar.  Wosar, now the chief technology officer of antivirus provider Emsisoft, was working to break other strains of ransomware, and he referred TeslaCrypt victims to Gillespie.  Wosar, too, shared his knowledge with Gillespie.

“Sometimes, when people seem genuinely interested, I just ask them if they want to come along,” Wosar said.  “I just open a screen share, and they can watch what I’m doing.  And I explain to them what I am doing and why, and what all this different stuff means.”

Wosar, Gillespie, Abrams and a handful of other volunteers worldwide began communicating over the messaging platform Slack, forming a group they dubbed the Ransomware Hunting Team.  Abrams would hear about a new type of ransomware through users’ posts on his website and send a sample to his teammates.  If they could solve it, they would.

Gillespie creates 90% of the decryptors available on BleepingComputer, Abrams said.  Since May, when Abrams began tracking statistics, decryptors on the site have been downloaded more than 320,000 times.

While BleepingComputer makes money from advertisers, members of the hunting team from time to time have discussed charging for their services.  Each time, “it left a sour taste,” Abrams said.  He recalled a mother who contacted him to say she’d lost photos of her son, a fallen Army veteran, to ransomware.  Abrams helped to decrypt her files.  “I couldn’t charge for that,” he said.

Wosar and Gillespie have each created more free, public decryptors than anybody else in the world.  The two have much in common: neither went to college and both consider themselves autodidacts, learning mostly from internet research.  Both found a home and friendships on BleepingComputer.  And both, Wosar said, suffer from imposter syndrome — feelings of inadequacy that persist despite their success.

“I think we’re all kind of misfits,” Wosar said, referring to members of the team.  “We all have weird quirks that isolate us from the normal world but come in handy when it comes to tracking ransomware and helping people.  That’s why and how we work so well together.  You don’t need credentials, as long as you have the passion and the drive to teach yourself the skills required.  And Michael clearly has it, right?”

As ransomware became increasingly prevalent, the Ransomware Hunting Team had trouble staying abreast of new variants.  “It just got to the point where we just couldn’t keep track any more,” Abrams said.

Gillespie quietly began working on a solution.  “I’m a programmer,” he said.  “What do I do?  I automate.”

At night, on his couch, Gillespie developed a site where victims could upload a ransomware-encrypted file and automatically learn what type it was, whether a decryptor existed and, if so, how to get it.  In March 2016, he launched ID Ransomware with an announcement on Twitter and on BleepingComputer.  “All too often after a ransomware attack, the first question is, ‘what encrypted my files?’, followed by ‘can I decrypt my data?’” he wrote.  “This web service aims to help answer those questions, and guide a victim to the correct information relating to their infection.”

The site took off immediately.  Victims, ransomware recovery firms and other researchers sent encrypted files for analysis.  When they submitted files infected by an unidentified type of ransomware, Gillespie added it to his database.  As before, he and other members of the team worked to create decryptors for newly discovered strains.  ID Ransomware currently can detect more than 780 strains, of which almost 40% have free decryptors, most of them developed by Gillespie or Wosar, and others by cybersecurity firms such as Kaspersky, Avast and Bitdefender.

He’s developed other free applications for victims, which are available on BleepingComputer.  RansomNoteCleaner removes ransom notes left behind after an infection — eliminating the time-consuming task of removing them manually — and CryptoSearch locates encrypted files and makes it easier to back them up, in the hope that a solution may someday be discovered.  ID Ransomware also cross-references the submitter’s IP address with Shodan, a site that can show a computer’s vulnerabilities.  If it detects an open port, which could have allowed the hackers in, ID Ransomware flags the vulnerability — and, like the notes Gillespie stuck in the high school lockers, suggests fixing it.

Gillespie worked nonstop.  “I felt like I never saw him,” his wife said.  “We would be hanging out in the evening, and he would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to go do this.’ And he would just disappear for hours.”

Volunteers around the world have translated ID Ransomware into two dozen languages, from Swedish to Nepali.  Only 26% of submissions to the site have come from the U.S.  “He collects amazing data because so many people use it,” Abrams said.  “He has tons of information.  You can see statistics, trends, what kinds of attacks are happening and when.  Everyone uses it.”

Those users include law enforcement, on both sides of the Atlantic.  Europol and Netherlands police flattered ID Ransomware by imitation, launching a similar but less comprehensive site.  An FBI agent from the Springfield, Illinois, field office asked to meet Gillespie, and they got together with another agent at a local Panera restaurant.

“The first meeting was nerve-wracking for me because, you know, why does the FBI want to talk to me?” Gillespie recalled.  “I was so awkward at that meeting.  I wasn’t thinking, ‘Am I gonna get arrested.’  But I did have in the back of my mind, ‘Am I gonna say something stupid?’”

The FBI needed help.  Victims often don’t report attacks to the bureau because they don’t want investors or the public to learn of their security lapses.  In 2018, the FBI received only 1,493 reports of ransomware — compared with the 2,000 queries daily to Gillespie’s site from about 750 different IP addresses worldwide.

At first, the agents sought information about the origins of a specific ransomware attack, something Gillespie does not investigate.  Then they began requesting lists of IP addresses that had uploaded files to ID Ransomware, which could help identify victims, as well as ransom notes and other material.  Gillespie, who discloses on the ID Ransomware homepage that email or bitcoin addresses uploaded to the site may be shared with “trusted third parties or law enforcement,” complied.

His assistance appears to have paid off.  Gillespie said agents indicated to him that his information may have been instrumental in last year’s indictment of two Iranian hackers wanted in connection with SamSam ransomware, which paralyzed computer networks across North America and the U.K. between 2015 and 2018.  Although the suspects have not been arrested, it was the U.S. government’s first indictment of cyberattackers for deploying a ransomware scheme.

Gillespie continues to meet regularly with FBI agents.  He tips them off, for instance, when a ransom note or extension on a file uploaded to the site identifies the targeted business.  Cooperation from such victims could help law enforcement learn more about the source of the ransomware, he said.

Some other ransomware hunters are warier of the FBI.  Abrams expressed concern that, despite the ID Ransomware acknowledgment, there could be “repercussions” from victims who might be upset that Gillespie identified them to the bureau.  Gillespie “is a little too trusting” of law enforcement, Abrams said.  “I do think that he’s not very worldly and that he sees things a little more black and white than with a lot of shades of gray.  And I think in that case he could be easily manipulated and taken advantage of.”

In 2017, the FBI awarded Gillespie a Community Leadership Award for his “public service, devotion and assistance to victims of ransomware in the United States and Internationally.”  Gillespie prominently displays the award in his home.  In April 2018, he and his wife flew to Washington for the award ceremony, accompanied by his boss at Nerds on Call.  The joke around the office was that the boss “went with him to try to nerf anybody trying to recruit him,” said Gillespie’s former co-worker, Jacobs.  “He would be very difficult to replace.”

Philosophically opposed to charging victims, Gillespie keeps ID Ransomware free.  He put up a link for donations to help cover the costs of running the site, but he didn’t bother to register it as a nonprofit, which would have enabled donors to deduct gifts from their taxes.  Contributions were scarce.  One $3,000 donation through PayPal proved to be a scam — Gillespie speculated that it may have been revenge by hackers whose ransomware he disabled — and PayPal demanded the money back.  He couldn’t repay it and switched to another service.

Gillespie “doesn’t chase money,” Jacobs said.  “If he were chasing money, he would have been living on the East or West Coast by now and doing something for some company that we’d all heard of instead of a little service provider in the Midwest.  But he’s one of those guys, he operates very heavily on principle.”

To make ends meet, Gillespie supplemented his Nerds on Call salary with a 2 a.m. paper route, delivering the local newspaper on his bike.  While he had enjoyed having a paper route in junior high, the job now depressed him.  But the family bills were mounting, especially for health care.  Morgan Gillespie struggled with diabetes and other medical issues.  Over the years, Michael Gillespie noticed blood in his urine, and in the fall of 2017, his wife finally made him see a doctor.  The physician removed a tumor and diagnosed bladder cancer, which rarely affects young adults.  Gillespie took one day off for surgery and one to recover before returning to work.  He underwent immunotherapy treatment weekly for two months, and the cancer has been in remission since.  Although he was insured through Nerds on Call, the costs for his care still added up.

The couple reached a financial breaking point.  They racked up credit card debt and fell behind on payments on Morgan Gillespie’s Nissan.  They rotated which utility bills they would pay; one month their electricity would be turned off, and the next month it would be gas.  They surrendered the car to the bank, which sold it at a loss at auction and forced them to make up the difference.  Last year, around the time his wife lost her job as a nanny, they missed four mortgage payments on their house and began to receive foreclosure notices, Michael Gillespie said.

Gillespie said he’s considering charging other security researchers for the statistics he gathers on the site, but he will always keep the tools free for victims.  Friends and family members nagged Gillespie to collect fees from ID Ransomware users.  Even his wife’s grandmother, whom Gillespie calls “grammy,” brought it up.  “I try to not interfere in that area,” Rita Blanch said.  “Unless, being silly at times, when I would say to him, ‘Babe, you need to charge, you could, like, be rich.’”

Other relatives “have been like: ‘Why isn’t he charging?  Why isn’t he making money off of this?’” said his wife, who recently found a part-time job as a babysitter.  “They think it’s almost dumb, the fact that he does what he does.  But that was just never what the deal was for us.  He just doesn’t want to take advantage of people who are already being taken advantage of.”

Instead, his fellow ransomware hunters stepped in.  Abrams covered the $400 cost of obtaining a certificate that lets users know they’re downloading from a trustworthy site.  Wosar began donating to ID Ransomware, and his employer, Emsisoft, hired Gillespie part-time this year to create Emsisoft-branded decryptors.  The money enabled the Gillespies to catch up on mortgage payments.

“He’s doing so much, how do you not support him if you can?” Abrams said.

After dinner one summer evening, Gillespie took a visitor to the Normal office of Nerds on Call, one of the company’s three locations in central Illinois, nestled in a strip mall between a check-cashing store and a Great Clips hair salon.  Gillespie, who has worked for Nerds on Call for 11 years, has keys, so he was able to open the office and disable the alarm system.  In the back, behind the retail area, is his desk, adorned with framed photos of his cats.

As his wife’s relatives often remind him, he could earn three times as much somewhere else.  But he’s happy at Nerds on Call, which gives him the freedom to work on ransomware in his downtime.  This year, he figured out fixes for the STOP Djvu ransomware, which was infecting files through pirated software.  Victims — who were unlikely to seek law enforcement assistance since they were committing a crime themselves — continue to press Michael for help unceasingly.  “It’s borderline harassment,” he said.

His frustration with the deluge of entreaties occasionally boiled over in his tweets.  “Everything you could possibly need to know is IN THE FUCKING FAQ, and its in BIG BOLD RED LETTERS,” he once responded.  “I’m losing sleep, losing time at my job, losing fucking sanity at this point.”

Some STOP Djvu victims thanked Gillespie.  Adam Hegedus of Szolnok, Hungary, was surfing the internet on his girlfriend's laptop in August when he disabled the anti-virus and firewall protections.  Ransomware crippled the computer, and a text file demanded $1,000 to restore access.  Hegedus' girlfriend is a teacher, and her lesson plans, thesis and other important documents were encrypted.  Hegedus felt so guilty that he couldn't sleep, and he sought assistance from several forums, including BleepingComputer.com.  This month, Gillespie replied with some good news; he had a decryption key.  Hegedus called his girlfriend, who rushed home and was delighted to be able to use her files again.

"You cannot imagine how grateful I am," Hegedus wrote to Gillespie.  "Everything has been decrypted and this is only because of your hard work." Hegedus offered a donation, but Gillespie declined.

Gillespie hopes that someday his services will no longer be needed, because businesses and people will have learned proper cybersecurity.  “If the world had backups, then we wouldn’t have ransomware,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, he plans to keep plugging away, even as hackers and their enablers pile up profits.  “There’s a time in every IT person’s career where they think, ‘I’m on the wrong side,’” he said.  “You start seeing the dollar amounts that are involved.  But nah, I can’t say that I ever have.  I just don’t care to go that way.”

ProPublica research reporter Doris Burke contributed to this article.

CYBER ATTACK- Ukrainian Havoc

"How a sophisticated malware attack is wreaking havoc on Ukraine" PBS NewsHour 6/28/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Governments and industries the world over are trying to deal with a new cyberattack, originating Tuesday in Ukraine and spreading rapidly through Europe and beyond.  The new attack shows signs of greater technical sophistication than one in early May, but both apparently used a leaked tool developed by the NSA.  Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Rodney Joffe of Neustar, Inc., about what's at stake.

CYBER SECURITY - The Global Cyber Attack, Update

"Microsoft’s president says global cyberattack is a ‘wakeup call’" PBS NewsHour 5/15/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A global ransomware attack has hit more than 200,000 victims, such as hospitals and schools, in more than 150 countries since Friday.  The virus takes advantage of a security flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system, which the company patched in March, though many users ignored the fix or refused to pay for it.  William Brangham reports and Judy Woodruff talks to Microsoft President Brad Smith.

"When should the government reveal cyber flaws to tech companies?" PBS NewsHour 5/15/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  If the government can detect that there is a hole in a company's software that makes it vulnerable to attack, do they have an obligation to tell that company, even if it gives away the government's tool for conducting surveillance?  William Brangham speaks with Eric Geller of POLITICO about that tension and what consumers need to know when it comes to cybersecurity and how to protect themselves.

CYBER WARS - Impact of Worldwide Attack

"Analyzing the impact of the worldwide cyber attack" PBS NewsHour 5/13/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Nearly 100 countries around the world worked to restore services after a massive cyber attack on Friday.  The ransomware attack appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, which was identified by the U.S. National Security Agency and later leaked to the internet.  Former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin joins Hari Sreenivasan for more on the attack.

FBI NEWS - Ransomware

"Incidents of Ransomware on the Rise" FBI News 4/29/2016

Hospitals, school districts, state and local governments, law enforcement agencies, small businesses, large businesses—these are just some of the entities impacted recently by ransomware, an insidious type of malware that encrypts, or locks, valuable digital files and demands a ransom to release them.

The inability to access the important data these kinds of organizations keep can be catastrophic in terms of the loss of sensitive or proprietary information, the disruption to regular operations, financial losses incurred to restore systems and files, and the potential harm to an organization’s reputation.

And, of course, home computers are just as susceptible to ransomware, and the loss of access to personal and often irreplaceable items—including family photos, videos, and other data—can be devastating for individuals as well.

Ransomware has been around for a few years, but during 2015, law enforcement saw an increase in these types of cyber attacks, particularly against organizations because the payoffs are higher.  And if the first three months of this year are any indication, the number of ransomware incidents—and the ensuing damage they cause—will grow even more in 2016 if individuals and organizations don’t prepare for these attacks in advance.

In a ransomware attack, victims—upon seeing an e-mail addressed to them—will open it and may click on an attachment that appears legitimate, like an invoice or an electronic fax, but which actually contains the malicious ransomware code.  Or the e-mail might contain a legitimate-looking URL, but when a victim clicks on it, they are directed to a website that infects their computer with malicious software.

One the infection is present, the malware begins encrypting files and folders on local drives, any attached drives, backup drives, and potentially other computers on the same network that the victim computer is attached to.  Users and organizations are generally not aware they have been infected until they can no longer access their data or until they begin to see computer messages advising them of the attack and demands for a ransom payment in exchange for a decryption key.  These messages include instructions on how to pay the ransom, usually with bitcoins because of the anonymity this virtual currency provides.

Ransomware attacks are not only proliferating, they’re becoming more sophisticated.  Several years ago, ransomware was normally delivered through spam e-mails, but because e-mail systems got better at filtering out spam, cyber criminals turned to spear phishing e-mails targeting specific individuals.

And in newly identified instances of ransomware, some cyber criminals aren’t using e-mails at all.  According to FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director James Trainor, “These criminals have evolved over time and now bypass the need for an individual to click on a link.  They do this by seeding legitimate websites with malicious code, taking advantage of unpatched software on end-user computers.”

The FBI doesn’t support paying a ransom in response to a ransomware attack.  Said Trainor, “Paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee an organization that it will get its data back—we’ve seen cases where organizations never got a decryption key after having paid the ransom.  Paying a ransom not only emboldens current cyber criminals to target more organizations, it also offers an incentive for other criminals to get involved in this type of illegal activity.  And finally, by paying a ransom, an organization might inadvertently be funding other illicit activity associated with criminals.”

So what does the FBI recommend?  As ransomware techniques and malware continue to evolve—and because it’s difficult to detect a ransomware compromise before it’s too late—organizations in particular should focus on two main areas:

• Prevention efforts—both in both in terms of awareness training for employees and robust technical prevention controls; and
• The creation of a solid business continuity plan in the event of a ransomware attack.  (See "Tips for Dealing with the Ransomware Threat" below)

“There’s no one method or tool that will completely protect you or your organization from a ransomware attack,” said Trainor.  “But contingency and remediation planning is crucial to business recovery and continuity—and these plans should be tested regularly.” In the meantime, according to Trainor, the FBI will continue working with its local, federal, international, and private sector partners to combat ransomware and other cyber threats.

If you think you or your organization have been the victim of ransomware, contact your local FBI field office and report the incident to the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.


Tips for Dealing with the Ransomware Threat

While the below tips are primarily aimed at organizations and their employees, some are also applicable to individual users.

Prevention Efforts

- Make sure employees are aware of ransomware and of their critical roles in protecting the organization’s data.

- Patch operating system, software, and firmware on digital devices (which may be made easier through a centralized patch management system).

- Ensure antivirus and anti-malware solutions are set to automatically update and conduct regular scans.

- Manage the use of privileged accounts—no users should be assigned administrative access unless absolutely needed, and only use administrator accounts when necessary.

- Configure access controls, including file, directory, and network share permissions appropriately.  If users only need read specific information, they don’t need write-access to those files or directories.

- Disable macro scripts from office files transmitted over e-mail.

- Implement software restriction policies or other controls to prevent programs from executing from common ransomware locations (e.g., temporary folders supporting popular Internet browsers, compression/decompression programs).

Business Continuity Efforts

- Back up data regularly and verify the integrity of those backups regularly.

- Secure your backups.  Make sure they aren’t connected to the computers and networks they are backing up.

More info

DATA SECURITY - Ransom of LA Hospital

"Ransomware attack takes down LA hospital for hours" PBS NewsHour 2/29/2016

This highlights the need to use good Anti-Virus utility AND do an image backup your entire system AFTER running a virus scan (the only backup you can use to recover your entire system).  I do my backup monthly using O&O DiskImage to an External USB drive that I disconnect after backup.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  One of the greatest threats to private cybersecurity today is ransomware -- a cyberattack that blocks access to a computer until the hacker is paid a ransom.  The problem recently took on new urgency when a hospital in Los Angeles had its entire network shut down for hours, putting hundreds at risk; another high-profile breach hit L.A.’s health department last week.  William Brangham reports.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  But, first, a look at what’s become the latest threat to our cyber-security.

The problem took on new urgency recently when a hospital in Los Angeles had its entire computer network, including all its digital medical records, locked up by hackers.  They demanded a ransom before they’d release the computers.  It was the second such attack this month.  L.A.’s Health Department was hit last week.

These types of computer attacks, which usually target individual computer users, are on the rise.

The “NewsHour's” William Brangham reported on this threat last year, and now he brings us an update.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  Inna Simone is retired.  She’s a mother and grandmother from Russia who now lives outside of Boston.  In the fall of 2014, her home computer started acting strangely.

INNA SIMONE, Retiree:  My computer was working terribly.  It was not working.  I mean, it was so slow.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  A few days later, while searching through her computer files, Inna saw dozens of these messages — they were all the same.  They read: “Your files are encrypted.  To get the key to decrypt them, you have to pay $500.”

Her exact deadline, December 2 at 12:48 p.m., was just a few days away.

All her files were locked , tax returns, financial papers, letters, even the precious photos of her granddaughter Zoe.  Inna couldn’t open any of them.

INNA SIMONE:  It says, “If you won’t pay, your fine will double.  If you won’t pay by then, all your files will be deleted and you will lose them forever and never will get back.”

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  Inna Simone, like thousands of others, had been victimized by what’s known as a ransomware attack.  Hackers — who law enforcement believe come mainly from Eastern Europe or Russia — manage to implant malicious software onto your computer, usually when you mistakenly open an infected e-mail attachment, or visit a compromised Web site.

That software then allows the hackers to lock up your files, or your entire computer, until you pay them a ransom to give it back.

Justin Cappos is a computer security expert at New York University.

JUSTIN CAPPOS, New York University:  It will actually lock you out of the files, the data on your computer.

So, you’d be able to use the computer but those files have been encrypted by the attacker with a key that only they possess.  It’s frustrating because you know the data is there.  You know the files are there.  You know your photos and everything is there and could be accessible to you.  But you have no way of being able to get at it because of this encryption that the attackers are using.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  This is exactly what happened at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles.  According to officials, about a month ago, their computerized medical records were locked up by one of these malicious programs, and a hacker demanded $17,000 in ransom to unlock them.

During this time, medical staff were forced to use paper and pen for their record-keeping, but they say no patient files were compromised.  The hospital decided to pay the ransom.  Their computers were unlocked, and the FBI is now investigating.

INTERNET - Ransomware

"The hack attack that takes your computer hostage till you pay" PBS NewsHour 4/18/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Ransomware, a type of software that computer hackers use to hold individuals' data hostage by blocking access to files unless they agree to pay a ransom, is on the rise.  And because anyone with an internet connection is vulnerable, the problem highlights a growing threat that consumers face on both their personal computers and mobile devices.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  Inna Simone is retired, a mother and grandmother from Russia who now lives outside of Boston.  Last November, her home computer started acting strangely.

INNA SIMONE:  My computer was working terribly.  It was not working, I mean, it was so slow.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  A few days later, while searching through her computer files, Inna saw dozens of these messages — they were all the same.   They read:  “Your files are encrypted.  To get the key to decrypt them, you have to pay $500 dollars.”  Her exact deadline — December 2nd at 12:48 pm – was just a few days away.

All her files were locked — tax returns, financial papers, letters — even the precious photos of her granddaughter Zoe.   Inna couldn’t open any of them.

INNA SIMONE:   It says, “If you won’t pay, within one week or whatever, your fine will double.  If you won’t pay by then, all your files will be deleted and you will lose them forever and never will get back."