The ransomware negotiator worked for the gang
The Deal
An American cybersecurity consultant has just pleaded guilty in a federal court. Their official job: negotiating with ransomware gangs on behalf of victim companies. Their real activity: secretly informing these same gangs about the negotiation status, victims’ payment capabilities, and sabotaging recovery attempts that could’ve avoided ransom payment.
The scheme is elegantly perverse. You call an “expert” to get you out of a mess, and this expert works against you from the start. They know your financial reserves, they know your backups are useless, and they’re playing both sides.
This isn’t an isolated case of a greedy individual. It’s a structural symptom of a market where everyone involved benefits from you paying. The negotiator (commission on the ransom), the cyber insurer (premium adjusted to perceived risk, not real), the gang (direct revenues). You’re the cash cow.
Why This Matters to You
If you’re reading MacSouverain, you probably already have an aversion to unverifiable third-party trusts. This case clinically confirms why.
The problem isn’t just that one guy was corrupt. The problem is that the ransomware business model creates incentives for everyone around you to prefer that you pay. Cyber insurance? It reimburses you (partially), so it doesn’t fight payment, it facilitates it. The negotiator? Paid by results, and “results” mean closing a paying deal (with commission) to restore your data.
When the entire ecosystem is aligned against you, the only tenable position is not to rely on it. No negotiator if you can restore alone. No cyber insurance as the main strategy if your backups are solid. Technical autonomy first, external recours as a last resort.
What You Do Now
1. Check that your backup strategy follows the 3-2-1-1 rule: three copies, two different media, one off-site, one offline (air-gapped). Kopia encrypts everything client-side before sending (zero-knowledge), destinations (B2, S3, NAS, SFTP) see only opaque, deduplicated blobs, indecipherable without your passphrase. If the server is compromised, your repo remains unreadable.
2. Test your restoration. A backup never tested is as good as none. Schedule a quarterly exercise where you actually restore a system from scratch.
3. Segment your network. A ransomware hitting your workstation shouldn’t have direct access to your backup NAS. Tailscale mesh wireguard + strict ACLs between segments.
4. Document your response procedure BEFORE the incident. Who you call (and why you trust them), which machines you isolate first, where your restore keys are. Not in Notes iCloud without ADP, nor in any shared doc in plaintext.