A small town in Massachusetts found itself paying a bitcoin ransom to hackers who had taken all its police files hostage. The Tewksbury Police Department’s system was infected with a “ransomware” program called Cryptolocker, which scrambled all the department’s files, including vital records. The only way to get the key to unlock them was to pay a $500 bitcoin ransom, which the police did.
Read it at The Boston Globe
