In February of 2024, a consortium of law enforcement agencies took down LockBit ransomware group. The discovery that LockBit retained victims’ stolen data despite promises to delete it demonstrates a critical flaw in the advice often given to ransomware victims. At the time, many legal and incident response professionals recommended payment on the assumption that LockBit had a strong financial incentive to honor its commitments and that the likelihood of data being publicly released after payment was relatively low. While that assessment may have appeared reasonable based on short-term observed outcomes, it relied heavily on assumptions about the behavior of a criminal enterprise that could never be independently verified. Read more