re: Scum of the earth. hackers who hold people for extortion…

quote:

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My company’s internal software was hacked about two years ago where all of our customer information is stored and where our sales guys place orders.

They tracked it back to Pakistan but they weren’t going to unlock the software unless they were paid $5 million in crypto and my company ended up paying.

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I worked in sales for a large, privately held medical supply company in the early 90's. When I started, we would call in our orders every night to an overnight crew of sales admins, but within a few months they gave us all company laptops and rolled out an "online" ordering system. You entered the order offline and then you would dial up over a 1200 baud modem and send the order. The next morning (the overnight order takers were fired/reassigned), sales admins would then log in to the ordering system, retrieve your order then manually enter it into the company wide system.

I had no idea at the time, but it was basically a firewalled intranet system. At no point were you on the company network. These two 80 year old Jewish brothers who owned the company were ahead of their time when it came to network security.

Plot twist: I left the company (ok, was asked to leave) and 18 months later I was calling on the same company in my sales job for a bleeding edge company selling intranet ordering systems that would one day (GASP!) be linked to ALL of you customers over this World Wide Web (Here! Have a free Netscape Navigator floppy disk) which was the new commercial section of this thing called The Internet. To my dismay, I was told no thanks and asked to leave (again). A few months later I was also asked to leave the company for which I was (not) selling this new fangled Worlds Web thing. Like the brothers, I was ahead of my time.

Hands down stupid shite is always going down in my family. Between him and my in laws and my ex wife I’m never surprised anymore.