Chronicle the Third · On the Ransom of Kingdoms
How to Survive a Ransomware Attack
A ransom note used to require a kidnapping, a rowing boat and considerable nerve. Now it requires one unpatched gateway and a criminal with a subscription. Standards have fallen everywhere, subject. Even in villainy.
Understand what ransomware is: your own scrolls, encrypted, sold back to you. It is not a plague, whatever the criers say. A plague takes the righteous and the wicked alike. Ransomware is a tax, levied exclusively on the unprepared, collected by brigands who have professionalised to the point of operating help desks, live chat and, the King swears this on the crown, customer satisfaction surveys. Somewhere a victim has rated their own extortion five stars for friendly service. The court held a day of mourning, and the brigands, presumably, a small party.
The Duke pays the tax
Consider the Duke of a Thousand Tabs, whose siege the court cannot stop discussing at feasts. One password, "password", to which he had added an exclamation mark some years earlier, for security, considering the matter closed. Backups gleaming with green ticks, every one lying to him since 2022, onto a disk that had died with more dignity than it was ever shown. A gateway that had begged for its patch for eleven months, politely, like a butler asking to be buried. The brigands did not breach the Duke, subject. They accepted his standing invitation.
The King offered the Duke three strategies. The counter-ransom: encrypt the brigands' ransom note and charge them for its return, a plan the royal lawyers reviewed for eleven silent minutes before writing, in full, "this is not how anything works". The invoice: bill the brigands for hosting their software, storage, power, wear upon the wallpaper, terms net thirty days; their help desk declined within the hour, which is more than the Duke's bank has ever managed. And the negotiator: Staple, Chief Information Security Officer of the realm, who reviewed the printed ransom note and ate it. The brigands sent another. He ate that too. Unnerved by an adversary who consumed all correspondence and could not be phished, threatened, or made to attend a video call, they moved on to easier prey. The learned dispute whether this constitutes strategy. The learned were not in the paddock. It was strategy.
The royal defences, in ascending order of madness
The Feast of the Restore. Once a year, before the entire court, one backup is chosen by lot and restored. Trumpets. Held breath. If the scrolls return, the kingdom feasts. If they do not, the Idiot Admin receives another honour for his mantelpiece and the feast proceeds anyway, grimmer, with the good biscuits locked away. Attendance is mandatory. The green ticks are not invited, for the Feast exists because green ticks lie. And the court has noticed, without ever quite saying so at the volume it deserves, that the years the restore succeeds are the years Dame Maud chose the disk. She tests it privately each February, humming, because "a ceremony is no way to find something out, sire". The trumpets disagree. The trumpets have been wrong every year that Maud was not consulted, a record the trumpets decline to discuss.
The decoy treasury. The court maintains a folder named TREASURY_FINAL_v2, prominently placed, magnificently guarded, containing four thousand pictures of geese. The brigands who breached it demanded a king's ransom for its return. The court declined, at length, in verse. The brigands, wounded, published the geese. The geese were a tremendous success, subject. The brigands have not recovered professionally, and one goose now has a following the court frankly envies.
Pre-emptive self-encryption. You cannot ransom what is already lost. In 2021 the court encrypted its own scrolls, first, out of spite, and cannot read them either. The brigands broke in, surveyed the wreckage, and left a condolence card. Checkmate, the King announced, to a room that has still not fully agreed.
Payment in exposure. When all else fails, the court offers to pay brigands with a mention in the royal chronicle. They always decline, and so the court mentions them anyway, unpaid: brigands, you are mentioned. The debt is settled. The court considers all invoices closed and its conscience magnificent.
Sire, the learned wish their dreary footnote read into the record, and I quote them at speed in the hope nobody notices: one backup offline and actually tested, the second factor on every gate, patches for the very walls, the free cures at No More Ransom before a single coin moves, and no one, ever, negotiating alone at midnight with a countdown clock, which is a machine for selling panic to the panicked. There. Read. The geese, sire, remain the better policy.
The brigand does not defeat the prepared, subject. He reads their offline backup policy, sighs, and moves along to your neighbour, who has been meaning to sort out security since the spring. Your neighbour is the Duke. Do not be the Duke. Be the geese. The geese, at least, were ready to be seen.
