Probably a boring answer but I know my grandmother’s credit card information. I live with and help take care of her, so she doesn’t mind sharing it with me. Not like I’m planning to do anything nefarious, but I guess technically it could ruin her financially.
Damn, I’m a bit surprised the ransomware team didn’t negotiate and was ‘offended’. Is that a known thing, not to try to negotiate? I suppose at that point the attackers know how much the company is worth, what profits are, etc. But now they also know you don’t have backups and are willing to pay a large amount of money to get your data back.
The worst thing you can do at a large company is not have someone knowledgeable and active in network monitoring because if they successfully exfiltrated that data like they normally try to do, now not only are they ‘offended’ enough to demand 25% more, they’re pissed off and willing to sell your proprietary data to competitors for pennies.
Ransomware gangs operate on the honor system (funny, but true) because if it’s known that you won’t get your data back even after you pay, nobody is going to pay. I think some of them have policies of dumping your data for free if you don’t pay.
I think it was right at the beginning. They may have low balled then the ransom guys came back with even a higher value. I don’t think the data have much in the value as it was mainly their ap and AR. One issue was they had in-house project management software developed that had hundreds of projects on the go and the stage they were at if I recall correctly.
I think you almost need to have a seperate department with a single IT guy whose only job is to test the security procedures. Not implement them but to just double check on the normal IT security procedures.