A Public Notice by Mississippi Center for Legal Services and North Mississippi Rural Legal Services of February 5 begins:
The purpose of this communication is to post notice that Mississippi Center for Legal Services and North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, [MCLSC/NMRLS] has been the victim of a ransomware computer system attack that has resulted in a breach of security. This breach of security resulted in the temporary shutdown of the organization’s computer system. This breach of security may have resulted in the compromise of data that may contain personal or confidential information relating to the current and/or former clients, contractors, vendors, attorneys or affiliated business partners of this organization. We have been working diligently to assess the situation.
With any unauthorized breach of computer system security, personal or confidential information of individuals maintained on the compromised system may be affected. As such, the personal or confidential information of current and/or former clients, contractors, vendors, attorneys or affiliated business partners of this organization may have been affected by this unauthorized breach of security. We have conducted and are in the process of further conducting an investigation to determine the scope and nature of the incident, to identify the affected individuals, and to restore the reasonable integrity of the data subject to the breach and the reasonable integrity of the computer system in general. Incorporated into this notice is the analysis from Complete Computers, our server vendor, which recaps the ransomware occurrence, what actions have been taken to restore services, and what measures are being undertaken to prevent this occurrence in the future.
The analysis report by Complete Computers begins:
On December 24th 2019, MSLS IT staff was contacted in regards to inaccessible email and server access. Upon inspection, it was determined that two servers were attacked by ransomware which encrypted most of files on both servers (NMRLS and MCLSC). The exact variance of ransomware is named: Ryuk. The attack encrypted most aspects of these two servers, both including but not limited to: work product files (word, excel, word perfect, etc.), email server database files (Outlook emails), the running virtual servers (applications), as well as the local backups that were performed every night. However, there are some aspects of the network that remained unaffected since they were on separate servers and used a different configuration. One of the major servers which remained unaffected by this attack was the Clients Prime Database server which holds all the client information for both programs.
You can read the full public notice here (pdf), but I’ve also embedded it all below, to preserve the report for those who would be interested in reading it.
PUBLIC-NOTICE