Hacker hits Winnipeg mattress store with ransomware

A local mattress and furniture supply store was forced to pay a hacker who shut down its servers, effectively putting a halt to services and sales there.

Winnipeg’s Best Sleep Centre was hit by the hacker earlier this month with ransomware, asking for 0.6 of a bitcoin or about $6,000 Canadian.

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Some experts say you should pay, others say you shouldn’t.

Owner David Keam said, ultimately, he had no choice but to pay because the cost of having to rebuild the entire server wouldn’t have been worth it.

“For me, to go back to counting everything I own and then going back to my storage service people and say I need to re-buy the system and reintegrate all of that,” Keam said, “we probably could have done it for $6,000, but we couldn’t have done it for what we talked them down to.”

Keam said “I looked at it from the point of view that they’re making a sale and how hard do I have to make this guy work. I told him that I can rebuild most of this, it’s just very inconvenient, but I got two grand. So, in the end he took the two grand.”

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Keam eventually paid $2,000 to regain his system and information, or 0.23 of a bitcoin.

He said it’s a lesson learned, because it could have been avoided by keeping his servers up to date.