I’m not certain what to think about the recent ARRL bulletin that provided more details about the cyber attack and subsequent million dollar ransom payment by ARRL. It might make an interesting story years from now after it quits chafing. After all, while mostly covered by insurance, payment of the ransom is almost never recommended by law authorities, and in some cases is even considered illegal since it funds criminal activity.

Additional details offered by the ARRL include that this was the work of organized crime with the FBI saying they hadn’t seen this level of criminal sophistication among many other attacks. The decision to pay the ransom came only after “days of tense negotiation and brinkmanship”. The lack of updates to members about the situation seems to have been strategic:

Based on the expert advice we were being given, we could not publicly communicate anything informative, useful, or potentially antagonistic to the TAs during this time frame.

The attack apparently involved encrypting data in place making it unaccessible by ARRL. Payment of the ransom brought with it the tools required to decrypt the data. Based on similar reports, the process of decrypting that data could have taken days or weeks which may explain the extended downtime.

Why this impacted LoTW long after most other ARRL services came back online remains a mystery though I don’t expect ARRL to explain it any further – until someday when we read the book or watch the move made from this entire episode.

This has been of ongoing interest to me because I gave up paper QSLing and went all in with LoTW nearly a decade ago. I now regret that and have gone back to paper QSLing. LoTW is a great concept for amateur radio, but it comes with many issues, not just the possibility of data loss. The ARRL CEO made it pretty clear in a recent QST editorial that the service is costly to maintain and future funding seems murky.

If ARRL thinks selling memberships without a printed monthly magazine is tough, wait until they have to begin charging for LoTW. The service is worth whatever they might one day charge for it, but folks never like things that were once free becoming a paid service. That usually goes over like a lead balloon…