Deal with ransomware the way police deal with hostage situations
When faced with a ransomware attack, a person or company or government agency finds its digital data encrypted by an unknown person, and then gets a demand for a ransom.
As that type of digital hijacking has become more common in recent years, there have been two major ways people have chosen to respond: pay the ransom, which can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or hire computer security consultants to recover the data independently.
Those approaches are missing another option that we have identified in our cybersecurity policy studies. Police have a long history of successful crisis and hostage negotiation – experience that offers lessons that could be useful for people and organizations facing ransomware attacks.
Understanding the problem
In the first nine months of 2019, mo...