Cops in Maine, US paid bitcoin ransom to decrypt files held hostage by ransomware.

Four city police departments and a sheriff's office in Lincoln County have a common computer network run by Burgess Computer. One day the entire system got encrypted by the Megacode ransomware, which then asked for Bitcoins to decrypt them.

Ransomware normally scans computers and networks for documents, produces a random encryption key per file, uses those to encrypt the data, and then keys are encrypted using a public-private key pair. It costs money to obtain the private key, holding the information to ransom. Targets have a few days to pay the ransom till the private key is deleted forever.

After trying in vain to restore the encrypted files, the police in Maine decided to go the ransom way.

The usual way of handling the ransomware is completing wiping off the disk and then reloading the offline backup files. Last week, Cops in Massachusetts were also caught in similar situation and had to pay bitcoins.

The FBI is now rewarding money worth millions to nab the offenders behind some ransomware. Though that is cheaper than police ransom payments, but rewarding criminals money cannot be considered a long-term solution.