Digital Ransom Takes Many Forms

It sounds almost silly to even bother saying that, right? We get story after story about Rootkits, Spyware, and the like, so “Digital Ransom Takes Many Forms” (almost) deserves to be taken with a giant Ho-Hum, amiright?

Sure. But what about when that Digital Ransom Demand comes from someone you—yikes—sorta do business with?

The PC-VIP digital empire consists of over a dozen websites. Additionally, we provide hosting to clients who understand the value of paying a little extra for expertise and customer service, so while Rent A Dad tries to appear non-geeky we’re pretty much in the trenches. And we’re in the middle of doing a complete re-organization of our web infrastructure that includes moving all of our sites to a new host.

One of our sites was formerly hosted at a company called iBrave, where we bought a pay-once-use-for-life hosting plan several years ago. iBrave went out of business earlier in 2024, and (Dad doesn’t have more details than this) the result of that was iBrave ceding all of their digital hosting assets to a company called 20i.

Stay away from 20i.

For all we know (reviews seem to say otherwise, by the way) 20i may provide great hosting. But when your Rent-A-Dad was moving that one site to our new host, he discovered both the defunct nature of iBrave and that 20i was demanding that to get our assets back we’d have to sign up for hosting at 20i. And to be fair, the digital ransom that 20i demanded was VERY small; 20i wanted one dollar for a four-month hosting plan, during which time we could download and re-use the website elsewhere. An absolute no-brainer; the other option was to reconstruct the Digitally-Ransomed site. Uggh.

Think about that. A company with whom we had no relationship had taken possession of our property and demanded that we do business with them if we wanted that property back. An interesting method of digital ransom. And yes, “interesting” is a euphemism.

Over the course of several back-and-forths with 20i, the sales rep we were dealing with acknowledged that 20i was doing exactly what I just described. The word “extortion” never came up, but ransom did, and he said (I have this in writing!) that it was reasonable to view 20i’s tactic as demanding ransom to get our property back.

And despite very much believing in the tactic of never negotiating with terrorists, Dad was ready to pay that dollar—until something even more sketchy than the silly ransom demand happened.

the 20i rep pointed me to the website where the four months/one dollar customer acquisition scheme is available. It isn’t special in any way; it’s not designed for displaced iBrave customers, but simply 20i’s current promotional pricing page. At which point I asked how I would specify that I was an iBrave customer looking to recover his property. And the answer? After signing up (please use a burner credit card when dealing with people you don’t know, kids), I could write to customer service and provide my driver’s license (a secure document from which I could easily have my identity stolen).

Oh sure. I’ll give that to a company that’s holding my property for ransom and has admitted as much. Digital Ransom Takes Many Forms, Indeed!

See this as a rant if you like—it is. But as with many of the things Rent A Dad has to say that can sound like that, please remember just how serious a problem this is at all the levels I described above. And … this one is simple … practice safe internet.