The frontman for the Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan, was in the news recently after revealing he paid a ransom when a hacker stole the band’s songs and threatened to leak them. The amount of the ransomware payment was not released. In the band’s view, the leak could have devastated the projected sales of their upcoming three-part rock opera, ATUM. The FBI investigated the case but it was not evident how the hacker gained unauthorized access to the material. “Somehow, some hacker was offering the files for money,” Corgan said in an interview on the Klein/Ally Show, “and we were able to trace it and pay off and keep it from leaking. The FBI got involved. I don’t know how they got what they got. … It was a mercenary person who had hacked somebody, I don’t want to say who, and they had other stuff from other artists. It wasn’t like some Pumpkins fan who was hellbent on breaking it on Reddit. Somehow, they gave some information that allowed the FBI to track them.” Similarly in 2019, Radiohead was threatened by a ransomware group, but the band took a different approach: They chose to release the stolen material quickly themselves for a nominal fee with proceeds going to charity, rendering the hacker’s stolen goods worthless. Read more about ransomware in the music industry here. These are prime examples of how cybercrime reaches past the boundaries of enterprises and businesses into the arts and performing arts where intellectual property is of a very high value. We spend a lot of time talking about the impact of ransomware on higher education, but the theft of intellectual property is very relevant to our faculty who are designers and artists. What can you do? Take security seriously and realize that even artists are targets. Take steps to secure your work: Keep your systems where you store your digital assets up to date. Maintain backups of your digital assets that are stored separately from the originals. Use unique and strong passwords. Employ multifactor authentication where possible.
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