Mark Niesse reports: Hackers have infected computers at a Georgia courts agency, demanding a ransom payment and causing officials to shut down court websites. The Administrative Office of the Courts was offline Monday as the state government tried to contain the hack. The agency maintains court documents, provides computer applications to some local courts and…
Category: Malware
UPDATE: Lake City fires employee after paying ransom in malware attack
WCJB reports: The city manager of Lake City, Joe Helfenberg confirmed that the director of information technology, Brian Hawkins, was fired. This decision comes after a “Triple Threat” cyber attack that disabled city servers, phones, and email that resulted in ransom. Lake City paid $460,000 in ransom for a cyber attack through the cyber cryptocurrency,…
Massachusetts Nonprofit Shelter Targeted by Ransomware
Marc Larocque reports: The nonprofit that runs the downtown homeless shelter was a target in a ransomware attack, which is a type of computer virus that encrypts user data, demanding ransom payments in return for access. Father Bill’s and MainSpring announced on Tuesday that it was attacked by a ransomware virus on April 11. But…
FL: Key Biscayne Reports Data Breach
Hank Tester reports that a third city in Florida has disclosed a cyberattack. In the past month, we’ve seen Riviera Beach and Lake City both wind up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom to attackers who managed to lock up systems with ransomware. In this newest case, we have not yet been told…
Seven weeks after a crippling ransomware attack, Lake City agrees to pay almost $500,000 ransom demand
On June 11, DataBreaches.net noted a report that Lake City, Florida was struggling to recover from “triple threat ransomware.” The attack had occurred on May 10, and one month later, the city’s landline phones were still knocked out and other services were also affected, although emergency services were operating. Now, one week after another Florida…
Borough of Westwood, NJ provides notice of a data breach that began in 2018
WESTWOOD, N.J., June 25, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — On or around December 22, 2018, Westwood became aware of unusual activity on the Westwood network. Westwood immediately launched an investigation into the activity, which included working with a leading third-party forensic investigation firm, to determine the nature of the activity. The investigation confirmed that malware was introduced on…