Sting Catches Another Ransomware Firm — Red Mosquito — Negotiating With “Hackers”

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FlyingPenguin
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Sting Catches Another Ransomware Firm — Red Mosquito — Negotiating With “Hackers”

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Is anyone really surprised?

These are companies that specifically sell themselves as never paying the ransom. People come to them who don't want to reward the bastards that did this to them in the hopes the data can be recovered by other means. These guys not only offered to pay the hacker the ransom, but wanted to charge the victim four times the ransom while claiming they had cracked it themselves.
“I am very confident we will be able to recover your files,” someone identifying himself as Conor Lairg replied later that day from a Red Mosquito email address, copies of the correspondence show. “We are now running tests and I will be in touch as soon as possible with an update.”

Two minutes later, Wosar’s hacker email account lit up with a response from “tony7877@protonmail.com.” The subject line contained the unique ID he had assigned to the victim, which meant the message could only come from Red Mosquito Data Recovery or someone that the company shared it with.
https://www.propublica.org/article/stin ... th-hackers
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