'Payment sent' – travel giant CWT pays $4.5M ransom to cyber criminals

Two big ransom payments in less than a week. Ransomware is going to spike heavy.

Tangentially, I wonder if there’s a side effect from COVID at play. I hypothesized at the beginning when mass workforces were moving to home offices that usual security functions like vuln/patch management would take a performance hit, which could lead to latent increased malware / ransomware abuse.

Would be interesting to hear from the frontline if theres actually any truth to it.

Forgive my ignorance, but if bitcoin's blockchain is a 'public ledger', how safe is for the attackers to keep anonymity when they got paid $4.5M in bitcoin?