Catalin Cimpanu reports:
Crooks are targeting government and educational institutions with a new ransomware family named MarsJoke (or JokeFromMars), discovered in late August, but which came to life this week through a massive email spam wave.
The group behind this ransomware is using emails disguised as air travel confirmation notifications, which also contain a link to a downloadable EXE file.
[…]
At the time of writing, there is no decrypter available for MarsJoke that allows victims to recover locked files.
Read more on Softpedia.
So… how many k-12 districts do you think are adequately prepared for this?
Right.
And if that doesn’t scare you enough to get your district to do something about infosecurity, read up on petya Mamba ransomware. Unlike other ransomware that locks up files, Mamba and petya lock up the entire hard drive. While I haven’t seen any report on these nasties in the education sector, why should the education sector be immune from it, right?