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Here at Malwarebytes, we always request that users hit with ransomware never pay the criminals, we say this for multiple reasons: Said Trainor, “Paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee an organization that it will get its data back-we’ve seen cases where organizations never got a decryption key after having paid the ransom. The FBI doesn’t support paying a ransom in response to a ransomware attack. Well last Friday, the FBI made a decision and not only did they officially inform the world that they agree, ransomware is getting worse, but also decided to tell folks to not pay the ransom, even if you do get infected. Naked Security did a good job covering this story and despite not having an opinion, the FBI did provide many possible protection measures to avoid ransomware infection in the first place.
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Now the FBI itself never officially made that claim and instead didn’t really give an opinion on whether or not to pay after a ransomware infection. So late last year, a quote was going around about a comment for the Special Agent in charge of the Cyber Intelligence program for a Boston branch of the FBI that mentioned how they advise users to just pay ransomware criminals because in many cases, getting the files back by any other method would have been impossible.
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