The FBI is Looking to Talk to Businesses Affected by Ransomware

This past January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an announcement that they had targeted and taken down the servers for a Dark Web organization responsible for the Hive ransomware group. While there is certainly cause for celebration here, one major statistic is enough reason to continue being concerned.

Only About 20% of Hive’s Victims Reported Their Problems to Law Enforcement

That’s over seven months, too. This is nowhere near enough, and even worse is the fact that law enforcement officials are under the impression that this number is high. There are several reasons why this might be the case, however. Some of them include:

• Federal investigators would be just another distraction to internal IT teams and complicate the process of data recovery efforts.
• Businesses might just not think to report it in the highly-stressful circumstances following a ransomware attack.
• Some organizations might believe that involving authorities would only escalate the attacks or get in the way of their own investigations.

However, the FBI’s goal is to identify those responsible for a given attack and to recover the data and/or funds, working discreetly to lend its aid to those impacted.

The FBI is putting forth effort to improve relationships with businesses so that proactive measures can be taken, in the event incidents occur. These resolutions can occur much more quickly if the organization has a good relationship with impacted businesses.

If You Work with Us, You Can Bet on the FBI’s Support

Considering the plethora of resources at the government’s disposal, it would be foolish not to involve the FBI in any ransomware attack. Furthermore, information from your attack could prove useful in finding and eliminating threat actors so that others don’t have to suffer the same fate as you—a worthy cause to say the least.

We’ll still work to prevent attacks whenever possible—after all, that is the best way to respond to attacks of any kind, to prevent them rather than deal with them as they happen—but that’s a different story. To get started, give us a call at 301-571-5040.