Last month, a major hospital agreed to pay $17,000 to a group of criminal hackers in order to regain control of its computer network. Actually, the hospital paid 40 bitcoins, the open source digital currency demanded by the hackers.
In a statement shortly after the incident, Allen Stefanek, president of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, defended the decision to play ball with the criminals.
“The quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems and administrative functions was to pay the ransom and obtain the decryption key,” he said in a Feb. 17 statement. “In the best interest of restoring normal operations, we did this.”
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