Recovering Ransomware-Encrypted Files: Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2

Question: How much will the ransom be?

Answer: A lot.

Depending on the value of bitcoin at that minute, a ransom demand can be anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand.

The hacker will seemingly come up with the demand on the spot, but it will all come down to how much they think you can pay.

In the previous part of this series you created a new email address which has no link to your actual identity.. All the hacker knows is that someone out there has had their data encrypted.

The hacker is probably getting a lot of email traffic from the thousands of victims who get compromised with each new wave of attacks, and so they probably wont spend much time thinking about your email in particular. You probably wrote to them in English and used a western-sounding name and the hacker will assume you are American… and so from their scam playbook they will have a price they think Americans will pay to recover their data.

8. Lets play pretend

Now create another email address, this time do your best to make it look like your are in a country from the other end of the wealth spectrum. Now write to the hacker (maybe even use Google translate to change languages) and ask them how much the ransom will be. There is a fair chance the ransom will be a different amount.

Try this approach a handful of times and with different locations to get the lowest ransom.

9. Pay the ransom

Oof. So nothing else has worked and you need to pay this internet scum the ransom they are demanding. How exactly do you do this?

Bitcoin