Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds
Great, now with the same logic the US Treasury Department should impose fines on parents who want to pay the ransom for their kidnapped children, because obviously (paying the ransom) benefits and promotes the illicit objectives of the kidnappers... Jesus Christ.<p>Anyone have any reasonable explanation for this? Wouldn&#x27;t it be better to fine companies that don&#x27;t have a security standard for their data?<p>edit: An example with apples:<p>Jhon is a guy who does not care about the security of his company and does not create backups, suddenly he receives a ransomware attack and all his data is now encrypted, he has no option but to pay the ransom or all his intellectual property will be unusable , so he pays, and since he paid the criminals, he also pays a fine for incentivizing ransomware ... At the end of the day nothing was fixed and the ransomware groups are happier than ever.<p>In a parallel universe we have an improved system, here it is regulated that all companies have either a backup of their information or a very robust system without back doors. Here Jhon also does not care about the security of his company, then it is discovered that Jhon does not have a backup copy and he is fined, Jhon pays and is forced to improve the security of his company, then he does it, then he receives an attack of ransomware, but Jhon refuses to pay because his company already has better security ... At the end of the day Jhon paid a fine, but the ransomware teams didn&#x27;t get what they wanted, the problem was fixed here.