There’s an update to an incident noted previously on this site involving the Camden County Courthouse in Missouri. RiskBased Security recaps what happened: Unknown persons compromised a courthouse computer hard drive containing e-mails belonging to county officials. Apparently the emails in question were the subject of an information request under Missouri’s Sunshine Law, intended to promote…
Category: Government Sector
MA: Melrose Police pay hackers $489 in Bitcoin to recover encryption key
Aaron Leibowitz reports: Hackers stole the encryption key to a software system at the Melrose Police Station on Thursday evening, compelling the department to pay the hackers one Bitcoin to regain control, Chief Michael Lyle told the Free Press on Monday. The attack came in the form of an email sent to the entire department…
Los Angeles County health department targeted in ransomware attack
Abby Sewell reports that Los Angeles County Department of Health Services computers were hit with a ransomware attack just days after a similar attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. The attack was on a smaller scale and the county did not pay any ransom. Nor, it seems, did they need to. Spokesman Michael Wilson said the agency…
Federal Times obtained and analyzed 26,381 security incidents reported by HHS components over a 30-month period
Kudos to Federal Times, who obtained a tremendous amount of data from HHS about security incidents involving their component systems. Aaron Boyd reports on their analysis of data, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The analyses look at types of attacks by components of HHS. Here’s some of their analysis and findings: The records…
IRS “Get Transcript” breach much bigger than first thought – now more than 700K victims
Andrew Taylor of AP reports: The IRS says the number of taxpayers whose tax information may have been stolen by computer hackers now exceeds 700,000 — more than double the agency’s previous estimate. The tax collecting agency says 390,000 more taxpayer accounts may have compromised than the 334,000 it warned about a year and a…
Anonymous: Turkish government cracks down on Twitter ‘hacktivists’ over leak of police data
Jason Murdock reports: The Turkish government has retaliated against a number of Twitter profiles that posted links to a compromised database stolen from a national police server. The users, which includes two Anonymous-affiliated accounts, sent out notifications to millions of followers containing a direct link to a huge 17.8GB-sized trove of sensitive data earlier this month. One…