This article was originally published in french on Crypto.Quebec’s website.
The computer systems are paralyzed. Unknown criminals are asking you to pay a ransom before they give you access to your data. As if that wasn’t enough, they are threatening to publish it all publicly. You think your day cannot get worse when a reporter calls. They saw news of this cyber attack posted on a dark web leak site, and they want to ask you some questions.
One of these reporters might be Dissent Doe, PhD, the pseudonym of the person behind The Office of Inadequate Security, a news website that can be found at databreaches.net.
Dissent’s background is in healthcare. She is mostly interested in breaches involving data from health and educational establishments. Not everyone appreciates her work. At the beginning of April, her website suffered a distributed denial of service attack. This means that someone was upset enough to blast the website with bogus requests to make it unavailable. The hostility she sometimes faces was clear when I first emailed her to see if she would be willing to be interviewed and she jokingly answered, “so many people already hate me. Now more will … lol.”
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