Southern Water takes the fifth over alleged $750K Black Basta ransom offer Southern Water neither confirms nor denies offering Black Basta a $750,000 ransom payment following its ransomware attack in 2024. The Register asked the utility company - which oversees water and wastewater services across the South of England and Isle of Wight - about the alleged ransom offer after it was included in last …
It should.
It should be a crime that gets CEOs locked up. The ONLY way ransomware is going to stop is if paying ransom becomes a crime with real prison time for whoever signs off on payment.
Remove the financial incentive, ransomware ends. And since going after the perpetrators who are inevitably in hostile countries is effectively impossible, the ONLY way to effectively do that is going after the payers by making them criminals. CEOs who WILL get caught if they pay and WILL end up spending a year or two in prison for paying will not pay.
So the company just goes bust if it can't recover the data? What if it's a government dept or a school or a hospital?
Is it a crime if they instead pay a "security specialist" 110% of the ransom demand and they are able to somehow "retrieve" the data?
Does it apply if their Swiss parent company pays the ransom - do you then imprison the CEO of MegaCorp UK ltd ?
Does it just mean that all data is now declared to be under Swiss or Panamanian jurisdiction and is subject to their ransomware laws
Yes, it goes bust. No change there, as paying a ransom doesn't get the data back anyway.
- Relying on a criminal network deleting their copies and having fully-working decryption tools that don't leave a backdoor for them to come back to squeeze you for more cash is unutterably stupid.
Yes. If you hire a hitman you still get prosecuted for murder. Same thing.
And finally, if they operate here, the laws here apply to that part of the business. That's well established in national and international law.
BTW, Panama does have an extradition agreement with Europe, so they would probably need to pick a better cover.
Is why it would be necessary to use a hallucinating LLM to analyse the chat logs..
I guess they may be in different languages but.. Surely there is a better way than that. Using ChatGPT to gather 'evidence' is just a sure-fire way to ensure that all guilty parties get off scot-free.
" WHY? is a report detailing the ransom amount of a UK water company not quoted in good old pounds sterling?"
or whittering on about the fifth amendment to the US constitution.
Our constitution may not even exist unless its Thursday and Aquarius is shagging Venus. It certainly does not have any amendments.
Not sure if Tunbridge Wells is in Southern Waters patch, but my house most certainly is.
If they are using the funds they demand from me every year to pay off criminals, then I am not very happy at all.
It's been a long time since I last had issue to contact my MP, but if this is true, I think it needs escalating somewhat higher that the pages of El Reg.
I'm happy for my money to pay for IT security and updates, but to use it for paying off scum? I would hope that this payment comes directly from the pay packets of the directors who cut/witheld the IT Op's/security budget.
No it's the size of the shot of Whiskey they took when they found out.
Or it's an ancient rule that Southern Water don't take money from customers:
Magna Carta Clause 5:
"For so long as a guardian has guardianship of such land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, fish preserves, ponds, mills, and everything else pertaining to it, from the revenues of the land itself. "
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