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Comment by oolongCat | Hacker News Reader

Ranked 151-200 in the QS rankings for CS. I bet if they handed this problem over to the CS people in the university they would have willingly helped them out to fix it.

Information security is even listed as one of their main research areas.

http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/cpsc_research

they even have some labs that does infosec

http://icis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/ http://ispia.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/

I bet the people at the CS dept must be pissed.

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You missed this quote under the picture: "University IT workers tried to crack the ransomware for more than a week before the payment".

BTW, are you implying that a strong CS university can break asymmetric encryption? Why is everybody assuming that hackers are stupid all the time, and only they are smart...

Actually I am implying it is possible for some types of ransomware. Here's an example.

https://github.com/leo-stone/hack-petya

(the hn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474613 )

RSA has some tools to assist with decryption from a few ransomware flavors. I would assume a few of the other big security firms do as well. We did this for a hospital that got hacked. It is not 100% successful and depends on the variant but is possible.

Perhaps a student saw an opportunity to get a quick $20,000 discount on their tuition?

Even if they were ranked first, I doubt that they can do anything against properly encrypted files. As the article states, they already tried and couldn't find a mistake in the encryption

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