1 Million Dollar Decryption Ransom paid by Webhosting Company

In what appears to be the biggest ever single openly reported success of ransomware in history thus far a South Korean webhosting company has paid out over 1 million USD in bitcoin (397.6 Bitcoin) to the hackers.

At the time of the attack, Nayana was running a witch's brew of vulnerable systems – an old Linux kernel (2.6.24.2) compiled in 2008, Apache 1.3.36 and PHP 5.1.4 (both dating from 2006) - almost begging the question of why it didn't happen before.

For those that say they don’t have a budget for security, they should look at this. You could hire a whole red team, an external security audit and use top notch protection tools for far less than $1 Million USD.

This serves as a lesson to all organizations everywhere about the damage that can be done through lack of infosec knowledge and expertise.