Recently there have been multiple large business in the news that have suffered RansomeWare attacks. Read the two articles below and do your own research on these attacks.

In the case of the Gas Pipeline, we know that the company paid the ransom. It is unknown as of the date I am writing this assignment if the Meat Supplier paid the ransom. One article states "Researchers claim that one hacking group has brought in more than $56 million from digital ransoms this year alone."

Discussion Topics:

1. Discuss the ethical implications of a company paying or not paying the ransom amounts.

2. Thousands of companies, school districts, hospitals, etc are impacted by RansomeWare attacks each year.

a. Does your answer change if it is a school district and they will loose or see publically released all data stored on your child?

b. What about if it is your doctors office or hospital that has been shutdown? Does that impact your position?

3. Does the fact that these funds go often fund criminal outfits or possible terrorism, impact your opinion?

4. Do the targets of the Ransomware attacks bear some of the ethical responsibilty for not adequately securing their systems?

5. Knowing that these atacks have impacted local Houston area hospitals and school districts, many argue that this is the wake up call they needed and they must now invest more in cyber security. However, in the case of a school district, there are limited funds per student and each dollar allocated to cybersecurity is a dollar not available for use in the classroom. At what point is it acceptable to take dollars from the classroom to improve security to try to limit these attacks.

6. Hacking is against the law in the USA. However, someone (individual/company/government agency?) hacked the Pipeline hackers back and were able to take down 2 servers and several bitcoin wallets. Discuss the ethics of hacking back, even if it is illeagal.

7. Tell me your concerns or any other ethics points I might have missed around ransomware atacks.