Technology

The trouble with cyber insurance

Offering cyber insurance is hard because the security landscape is so complex, yet the market appears to be booming.

02 February 2021

It happened like this. A little after 3 am on August 31 last year, a system administrator started her shift at Stefanutti Stocks, one of South Africa’s largest construction firms. She wasn’t at the office, but then the company’s IT personnel had been working from home for a number of years anyway. Around two hours later, when she got around to the file-based administration, she noticed something strange – file after file that she tried to access was corrupt. Then she pulled up a directory. It had been encrypted, and showed this grammatically challenged message, by turns cheerful and threatening: ‘Hi! Your files are encrypted and if for some reason you read this text before the encryption ended, this can be understood by the fact that the computer slows down, and your heart rate has increased due to the ability to turn it off, then we recommend that you move away from the computer and accept you have been compromised, rebooting/ shutdown will cause you to lose files without the possibility of recovery and even god will not be able to help you…’

There were also two email addresses, and a demand for 455 Bitcoin in ransom, which at the time was worth about R86 million.

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