It can start with something as simple as a low-level employee falling for a fishing scam,

you know, like an email poisoned with a link inside or an invoice for some transaction they

never initiated. From there,

having acquired just a tiny bit of login information, there's sometimes a kind of incubation period

when hackers use it to break all the way into an organization's private files. And then the bad

guys go in for the kill. They send an email bragging about all the private

stuff they've gained access to and threaten to use it to wreak havoc on a firm's reputation

or ability to do business unless that company pays up many thousands or even millions of dollars.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. They're called ransomware attacks, and they really are among modern organizations' worst nightmares.

Law enforcement may not be able to help, given how hard it is to even track down where the hackers are located.

So some companies hire professional fixers to deal with the criminals, hoping to recover stolen data without losing millions to extortion.

It's a brand new kind of job, and as my guest will tell us, pretty much every aspect of this work is sensitive and surprising.

Amanda Chicago-Lewis is a journalist whose article Secrets of a Ransomware Negotiator was published by

The Economist. Amanda, welcome to think. Thanks for having me, Chris. So to show how these attacks

and counterattacks work, you traced a digital break-in to the files of this one company from the

moment of the breach until the resolution. But to get access to that story, you had to

promise to keep the identity of the company secret. Why are the targets of these attacks

sometimes reluctant to even contact law enforcement? Well, part of the point of the attack is to shame

the company. You know, they steal the data and they're

holding the data hostage. But if the company has backups, then what the gangs are threatening

is really just the reputation of being bad with security. And so everything is really

shrouded in secrecy because most companies don't

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