Alicia Hope reports: A ransomware attack targeting medical technology firm slowed down clinical trials for the past two weeks, according to the New York Times. The attack targeted a Philadelphia company that develops software for clinical trials, including the crash effort to develop rapid coronavirus tests, treatment, and the vaccine. The attack on eResearch Technology forced…
Category: Malware
State Financial Regulators Issue Ransomware Mitigation Tool
Kimberly Peretti, Amy Mushahwar, and Alysa Austin of Alston & Bird write: On October 13, 2020, state financial regulators in partnership with the Bankers Electronic Crimes Taskforce and the U.S. Secret Service, released the Ransomware Self-Assessment Tool (R-SAT) to help financial institutions mitigate the risks of ransomware. The R-SAT is a detailed questionnaire designed to evaluate the…
British Airways Fined $26 Million in U.K. Probe Over 2018 Data Attack
British Airways has been fined £20m (U.S. $26 million) by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office for a 2018 breach that impacted more than 400,000 customers. That penalty is significantly less than what the ICO had indicated it intended to do. In a press statement accompanying the monetary penalty notice, the ICO stated: An ICO investigation…
More details emerge on Hall County, Georgia ransomware attack
As reported previously on this site, Hall County, Georgia had revealed a ransomware attack on October 7, but until now, we didn’t know who attacked them. Now the threat actors known as DoppelPaymer have added Hall County to their dedicated leak site. In their updates, the county had reported: At this time, there is no…
Privacy nightmare for Toledo Public Schools: Hackers dumped student and employee data
By mid-September, it was clear that school districts were under increased threat of ransomware attacks. In fact, when Clark County School District (CCSD) in Las Vegas and Fairfax County Public Schools (CFPS) in Virginia were added to the Maze cartel’s leak site, it seemed to portend potentially big data dumps. Since that dump, Maze dumped…
CISA and MS-ISAC Release Joint Guide on Ransomware
Trisha Anderson, Ashden Fein and James Yoon of Covington & Burling write: On September 30, 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (“MS-ISAC”) released a joint guide synthesizing best practices to prevent and respond to ransomware. This guide was published the day before OFAC and FinCEN released their…