Catalin Cimpanu reports: A ransomware gang tried to extract a ransom payment of an unheard-of sum of $5.3 million from the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, but the city chose to restore from backups after hackers rejected a smaller counter-offer of only $400,000. The incident happened in early July, but details were kept under wraps…
Category: Government Sector
AU: Porter’s office in privacy breach
Alice Workman reports: Who knew the one thing that could unite Australia’s diverse multicultural leaders was a privacy breach by the Attorney-General’s office? Christian Porter gathered religious leaders and journalists at The Great Synagogue in Sydney’s CBD last Thursday to read his draft religious discrimination bill. Not all attended — the Catholic Church and Australian…
Update on Baltimore’s ransomware attack
Dan Kobialka reports: Baltimore city officials last week agreed to transfer $6 million from a fund for parks and public facilities to help cover “remediation and hardening” costs associated with a May 2019 ransomware attack, according to The Baltimore Sun. In addition, Baltimore officials last month said they are considering purchasing cyber insurance, The Baltimore…
Phishing scheme gains entry to Oregon Judicial Department emails
Aubrey Wieber reports: A phishing scheme succeeded in breaking into the email accounts of five Oregon Judicial Department employees, exposing personal information of more than 6,000 people. A forensic team determined that none of the information has been used in an inappropriate way so far. Read more on Mail Tribune.
IN: Man detained for data theft at Revenue dept.
Sharad Vyas reports: A desktop engineer from the State Information Technology (IT) Department was detained on Tuesday for allegedly stealing data from the Revenue Department, after the government filed a complaint with the Marine Drive police station. The engineer allegedly hacked into 28 computers connected to the Mumbai Collector, Deputy Collector and other tehsil offices….
IN: Ransomware attack forces emergency shutdown of Lake County government servers, IT working through weekend to purge system
Will Racke and Anna Ortiz report: Lake County has been hit with a cyber attack that forced the shutdown of email service and several internal applications throughout county government, officials said Friday. [..] As of Thursday afternoon, the county’s IT staff was installing cyber security software on 3,000 individual employee laptops, Mark Pearman, director of…