The Teamsters union was the victim of a ransomware attack in 2019 that paralyzed one of the group’s email systems and data, but the FBI at the time told them to pay the ransom because they could not help, according to a report from NBC News.
Consulting with their insurance company, the Teamsters opted not to pay the ransom, which was originally set at $2.5 million but the union had negotiated down to $1.1 million. When the union approached the FBI for help, the Bureau declined to help, advising the union to pay the ransom to get the encryption key to unlock the system.
“They said ‘this is happening all over D.C. … and we’re not doing anything about it,'” a source told NBC.
The official position of the FBI is that victims of ransomware not pay the hackers for fear of emboldening the attackers. However, as the attacks become more frequent with more potential damage to companies and public services, more victims have opted to pay the money to regain access to their systems.
The Teamsters, however, opted to not capitulate and to handle it on their own. Using system backups and re-entering some data through paper files, the Teamsters were able to reconstruct 99% of the lost data.
The union states that the data was never compromised or accessed; it was just frozen, unlike most current attacks in which the hackers threaten to release captured information to the public.