Please Pay the Ransom in Bitcoins

aunty dive

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Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing begins an association with a new sponsor this weekend at Sonoma Raceway, and how the arrangement came into being is one of the more unusual stories in NASCAR.

"Malwarebytes, a California-based company that provides advanced malware prevention and remediation, will serve as an associate sponsor on Michael McDowell's No. 95 Chevrolet for Sunday's Toyota/Save Mart 350 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). The company will be the team's primary sponsor next month at New Hampshire Motor Speedway as well as other select events this season.

Before this year's Sprint Cup Series race at Texas Motor Speedway in April, crew chief Dave Winston wasn't familiar with Malwarebytes. But after a virus infected his company computer, encrypting crucial files and leaving him and his team feeling helpless, he learned not only about computer security, but about an entire underground network of cyber thieves, ransomware and the digital currency known as bitcoin.

The story sounds more similar to a script for a spy thriller than a real-world occurrence, full of intrigue and secrecy, including a theft and a ransom note, the result of a virus attack that left no trail and few clues.

But this was no Hollywood movie. The attack and the ransom note were real.

The hostage in this instance was crucial information belonging to the CSLFR team -- chassis information, wind tunnel and simulation data stored on Winston's computer. With the team making preparations for the Texas race, the inability to access those files brought work to a standstill.

Winston told NASCAR.com that he was in his office working on his computer when he noticed random files beginning to show up in various folders...."

More from NASCAR.com
 
I ran into a new variant of this puppy at work this week. Fortunately, it didn't encrypt the user's data stored on the network. Everything related to work is supposed to be up on the network, but he was caught with a small percentage of data on the local hard drive. Mostly it was some older developmental stuff, and that data could just as easily have been lost to a hard drive crash, laptop theft, etc.

I don't know who provides IT support for Circle, but somebody needs to explain the importance of off-line backups to these guys.
 
If you are so desperate that you think hacking Leavine Family Racing could potentially improve your performance, you might want to plan your racing exit strategy :D
 
If you are so desperate that you think hacking Leavine Family Racing could potentially improve your performance, you might want to plan your racing exit strategy :D
It's not a targeted hack. It's a mass e-mailing with a contaminated attachment.
 
Dang son, sounds like he got some form of the Crypto virus. As @Charlie Spencer said, that's crazy that they didn't have backups. I'm surprised that they paid the ransom and that they actually got their files back too. I figured that the jerks would just have left them encrypted and taken the money.

We occasionally use MalwareBytes where I work. It seems to work well enough.
 
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