“They set the ransom so low that, as violated as I feel and as much as I wanted to fight, at the end of the day I realized I can pay and get back to work,” he said.
To recover Advantage’s data, Natalie Stefanick, marketing manager for her father’s company, drove to a nearby Walgreens, pulled a MoneyGram gift card off a rack and asked the cashier to load $400. Within 30 minutes, a program that unencrypted the data began to run.