Firms girding for hacker ransom demands

Bitcoin stockpiles created to avert losing corporate data

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. corporations that have long resisted bending to the demands of computer hackers who take their networks hostage are increasingly stockpiling bitcoin, the digital currency, so they can quickly meet ransom demands rather than lose valuable corporate data.

The companies are responding to cybersecurity experts who recently have changed their advice on how to deal with the growing problem of extortionists taking control of the computers.

“It’s a moral dilemma. If you pay, you are helping the bad guys,” said Paula Long, chief executive of DataGravity, a Nashua, N.H., company that helps clients secure corporate data. But, she added, “You can’t go to the moral high ground and put your company at risk.”

“A lot of companies are doing that as part of their incident response planning — they are setting up bitcoin wallets,” said Chris Pogue, chief information security officer at Nuix, a company that provides information management technologies.

He said he believed thousands of U.S. companies had prepared strategies for dealing with hacker extortion demands, and numerous law firms have stepped in to facilitate negotiations with hackers, many of whom operate across the globe.

Symantec, a Mountain View, Calif., company that makes security and storage software, estimates that ransom demands to companies average between $10,000 and $75,000 for hackers to provide keys to decrypt frozen networks. Individuals whose computers get hit pay as little as $100 to $300 to unlock their encrypted files.

Companies that analyze cyber threats say the use of ransomware has exploded, and payments have soared.

One of the reasons midsize and large companies are storing bitcoin for emergency use is that extortionists, once they succeed at penetrating a system, commonly give a deadline for payment before destroying data. But victims can’t rush out and buy bitcoin in a day or two.

“It takes at times a week for (brokers) to process you,” Barysevich said.

TIM JOHNSON/MCCLATCHY/TNS Cybersecurity experts show their products at this year’s RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. The conference is a major expo for digital security.