Two men, usually in the dead of night, work stealthily to infiltrate government agencies or companies to get access to their secrets. Except in this case, the accused were IT geeks sitting in front of computers halfway around the world in Iran. The ransomware would encrypt data on those computers — rendering that data inaccessible to the victims. To maximize the impact, the hackers launched their attacks outside regular business hours and also targeted backups of victims’ data, authorities said. “These defendants didn’t just indiscriminately cross their fingers and hope their ransomware randomly compromised any computer system.

Source: National Post November 28, 2018 21:33 UTC