Kidnapping / Ransomware

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Larry Harb:

Kidnap and ransom or extortion. I used to work for a bank. There’s a number one problem in a bank ‘cause we always thought—we always had kidnap insurance because we were always afraid that the president’s kids would be kidnapped and held for ransom. Well, the truth is, with all my years in banking, I’ve never heard of that happening. However, now the world of the internet—extortion, we get this claim all the time, you know? What a crime. Ransomware. Those kind of things where they hack your computer, okay, and now hold your files hostage and if you don’t pay us—alright—then we’re not gonna give you your files back ‘cause we’ve encrypted them. We had an auctioneer, less than two months ago, have this happen. They got a notice that all of their files were encrypted. Now, think about this. This guy does mainly online auctions. Somebody hacked his system, encrypted all of his files, and now he couldn’t get access to anything in his computer system. Good news was, he had an extortion policy, and it’s covered under the cyber policies where we put it. Okay? So, he had the coverage. Truth was, our forensic guys—we sent forensic team in—they could not unlock the computer. We ended up having to pay the ransom. And the insurance policy did. It paid the ransom. We had to pay it in Bitcoin, which was a whole other issue, okay, but we paid the ransom—got his files back. And he’s back up and operating. It’s out there. It happens.