How hackers extorted $1.14m from University of California, San Francisco
A leading medical-research institution working on a cure for Covid-19 has admitted it paid hackers a $1.14m (£910,000) ransom after a covert negotiation witnessed by BBC News. The Netwalker criminal gang attacked University of California San Francisco (UCSF) on 1 June. IT staff unplugged computers in a race to stop the malware spreading… UCSF is now assisting the FBI with its investigations, while working to restore all affected systems. It told BBC News: “The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good. “We therefore made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained.
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by Joe Tidy, BBC.