On March 17, the Town of Houlton, Maine disclosed that they had experienced a malware attack. According to their disclosure, on October 16, 2019, they discovered that part of their network had been locked up by a virus that prevented access to files. The department was able to quickly restore from backup, and claim that…
Category: Government Sector
Amid coronavirus scare, Netwalker ransomware targets public health agency in Illinois
Benjamin Freed reports: A public-health agency in central Illinois has had to retreat to social media to update residents about the ongoing spread of the new coronavirus after a ransomware attack disabled its main website and briefly cut off employees from medical files. Workers at the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District discovered Tuesday that they were victims of…
Oklahoma Accused of Negligence in Massive 2018 Data Breach
Randy Ellis reports: A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the Oklahoma Department of Securities over a massive December 2018 data breach that allegedly caused the names, Social Security numbers and other personal information of more than 300,000 people to be published to the internet. The department caused the data breach by negligently misconfiguring a…
Dutch government loses hard drives with data of 6.9 million registered donors
Catalin Cimpanu reports: The Dutch government said it lost two external hard disk storage devices that contained the personal data of more than 6.9 million organ donors. The hard drives stored electronic copies of all donor forms filed with the Dutch Donor Register between February 1998 to June 2010, officials from the Dutch Minister of…
Mistrial declared at federal trial of accused CIA leaker Joshua Schulte
Ben Feuerherd and Jorge Fitz-GibbonMarch report: A Manhattan federal judge declared a mistrial Monday in the case of a former CIA programmer accused of turning over a trove of secret documents to Wikileaks. US District Judge Paul Crotty made the call in the case of accused leaker Joshua Schulte after the jury declared itself “extremely…
NC: Durham City and County services targeted in cyber attack, 80 servers taken offline
Elaina Athans reports: Whether you call the Durham Police Station or the city’s fire department, you’ll get the same message, a recording that plays, “line has been disconnected.” It’s the result of widespread hacking. Durham city officials said 80 servers were taken offline after a cyber malware attack late Friday night. Read more on ABC11.