- timely response
- initial disclosure by company and not third party
- actual expression of shame and remorse
- a decent explanation of target/scope
i could imagine being cyclical about the statement, but look at other companies who have gotten breached in the past. very few of them do well on all points
From customer perspective “in an effort to reduce the likelihood of this data becoming widely available, we’ve paid the ransom” is probably better, even if some people will not like it.
Also to really be transparent it’d be good to post a detailed postmortem along with audit results detailing other problems they (most likely) discovered.
The cost of an attack like this is in the thousands of dollars at most, the ransom payments tend to be in the millions. The economics of not paying just don’t add up in the current situation.
You could very well be making a payment to a sanctioned individual or country, or a terrorist organization etc.
For example the UK government publishes guidelines on how to do this and which mitigating circumstances they consider if you do end up making a payment to a sanctioned entity anyway https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctio...
They directly state as follows:
> An investigation by the NCA is very unlikely to be commenced into a ransomware victim, or those involved in the facilitation of the victim’s payment, who have proactively engaged with the relevant bodies as set out in the mitigating factors above
i.e you’re not even going to be investigated unless you try to cover things up.
This is a solved problem, big companies with big legal departments make large ransomware payments every day. Big incident response companies have teams of negotiators to work through the process of paying, and to get the best possible price.