ransomware

30Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LIFESTYLE

Basic Cybersecurity Precautions Are Key To Minimizing Ransomware Damage, Interference With Elections And Disinformation

Government computer systems in Hall County, Georgia, including a voter signature database, were hit by a ransomware attack earlier this fall in the first known ransomware attack on election infrastructure during the 2020 presidential election. Thankfully, county officials reported that the voting process for its citizens was not disrupted. The attack follows on the heels of a ransomware attack last month on eResearchTechnology, a company that provides software used in clinical trials, including trials for COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. Less than a week after the attack in Georgia was revealed, the FBI warned that cyber criminals have unleashed a wave of ransomware attacks targeting hospital information systems. Attacks like these underscore the challenges that cybersecurity exp...

Ransomware criminals are targeting US universities

As COVID-19 cases in the U.S. continue to climb, government and higher education leaders have been focused on doing what it takes to protect campus communities from the global pandemic. But college and university leaders would be wise if they were just as vigilant about protecting their sensitive data from the cybercriminals who are becoming increasingly sophisticated about encrypting the colleges’ data and making the colleges pay a ransom to get it back. One of the latest examples is a ransomware attack that struck the University of California, San Francisco on June 1. In that case, cybercriminals used the NetWalker malware to encrypt data on the servers of the university’s school of medicine. This malware targets corporate networks and encrypts the data it finds on the attacked devices...

Deal with ransomware the way police deal with hostage situations

When faced with a ransomware attack, a person or company or government agency finds its digital data encrypted by an unknown person, and then gets a demand for a ransom. As that type of digital hijacking has become more common in recent years, there have been two major ways people have chosen to respond: pay the ransom, which can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or hire computer security consultants to recover the data independently. Those approaches are missing another option that we have identified in our cybersecurity policy studies. Police have a long history of successful crisis and hostage negotiation – experience that offers lessons that could be useful for people and organizations facing ransomware attacks. Understanding the problem In the first nine months of 2019, mo...