So this is the story that's been stuck in my head all week and it's not the one you'd expect. Everybody and their cousin is writing about the Xbox One launching today (it did, midnight lines and all, I walked past the GameStop on my way home and there were maybe fifteen people still standing around comparing notes on install sizes) but thats not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a police department in Massachusetts that got mugged by a piece of software and paid the ransom in Bitcoin.
The department is in Swansea, a small town down near Fall River. Somebody's computer got hit with CryptoLocker, which if you havent run into it yet, consider yourself lucky and also please back up your files right now, Im serious, close this tab and go do it. CryptoLocker's been making the rounds since September and it doesnt mess around. It slips in through an email attachment, usually something dressed up as a fax notification or a shipping confirmation, and once its running it quietly encrypts every document, photo, and spreadsheet it can reach with an RSA key that isnt sitting on your machine. Then it puts up a red countdown screen telling you to pay up in 72-ish hours or the key gets destroyed and your files are gone for good.
The Swansea PD apparently didnt have a clean backup of whatever got hit, and rather than lose their files they ended up paying roughly two bitcoins, something like $750 at the time, to get the decryption key. A police department. Paying criminals. In an internet currency that half the Senate was just holding hearings about last week because they werent sure if it was a tool for drug dealers or the future of money or both.
And thats the part that gets me. Bitcoin's been having this weird dual moment lately, half legitimacy tour and half punchline. You've got the Senate hearing making it sound almost respectable, price climbing because of it, and then in the same two weeks youve got a municipal police department using it to pay off ransomware because theres genuinely no better option on the table. Cant exactly wire a criminal $750 through a bank and expect it to go smoothly, and a decryption key isnt something you can dispute through a credit card chargeback. Bitcoin is just the only rail built for this specific, awful transaction. Nobody designed it to be ransomware currency, it just happens to be really good at it, no ID required, no way to claw it back, done in ten minutes.
Ive said this before on here but Ill say it again because apparently it needs repeating: an external drive is like twelve dollars a gigabyte cheaper than panic. I keep two, one plugged in that does a nightly sync and one sitting in a drawer at my sister's place that I swap out every couple months, and yes I know that makes me the annoying friend who lectures people about backups at dinner, I dont care, I was that friend before this story and Im going to be even more insufferable about it now. The people who get hit by this stuff arent doing anything obviously dumb, theyre opening an email that looks exactly like the fifty other work emails they open every day. Thats what makes it work.
What strikes me about a police department specifically getting hit is that if anyone should have IT policies buttoned up its them, and they still ended up paying a ransom in an obscure digital currency most of their own officers probably couldnt have explained a month ago. Thats not really a knock on them, its more that this stuff is genuinely hard to defend against once its already running, and once its running your options collapse down to "pay" or "lose it all." No amount of afterthe fact antivirus scanning brings your files back. The encryption already happened, it already worked, the malware doesnt even need to still be on your machine.
Anyway. Go check that your backups actually ran and arent just sitting there with a red X on them from three weeks ago because the drive filled up, which is a thing that has happened to me, more than once, which is exactly why I now check. The Xbox One can wait for its own post, this was more interesting.