No. 95 team’s data got hacked this spring and paid ransom to get it back
Circle Sport Leavine Family Racing had a run-in with hackers this spring.
The team said its data got hacked in April and it was forced to pay the hackers a ransom to get it back. The team said it houses everything on Dropbox and first noticed odd activity when a flurry of files was being uploaded to the file hosting and sharing service.
When the team went to open the files after noticing the activity, they all were encrypted and had a ransom note on them, demanding the ransom be paid or the files would be destroyed.
“First you don’t want to believe it, but every file I tried to open had the same thing,” Dave Winston, the team’s crew chief told Fox Sports. “You know in this sport, the computers have so much information on them, whether it’s track data or wind-tunnel data, engine data, personnel issues, parts issues — all sorts of information.”
The team fields the No. 95 for Michael McDowell and Ty Dillon. It has an alliance with Richard Childress Racing and the team told Fox the data, including aerodynamic info, setup notes and more, was valued at $2 million and would have taken 1,500 hours to recreate.
So the team decided to pay the ransom. And had to pay it in BitCoin.
“We made the decision that we would pay it (the ransom) and hope that we would get it (the data) back,” said Winston. “We had to learn about bitcoins and all sorts of ways to make the payments because they wanted it anonymous of course.”
The team has since taken significant steps to protect its information.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
