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…
Category: Malware
Rockville Centre pays almost $100G to hackers after ransomware attack, officials say
Joie Tyrrell reports: The Rockville Centre school district paid almost $100,000 to restore its data after being hacked with a ransomware virus that encrypted files on the system’s server until payment was made to unlock the information, officials said Friday. The Nassau County district was among several statewide targeted by a ransomware virus that encrypts…
UK Police Investigations Still Affected by Ransomware Attack
Akshaya Asokan reports: The June ransomware attack against one of the largest forensic labs in the U.K. continues to delay police investigations in Britain while authorities await test results. At one point, authorities were confronted with a backlog of 20,000 forensic samples – including DNA and blood-samples – that were awaiting analysis for criminal cases,…
Adwind Spyware-as-a-Service Attacks Utility Grid Operators
Tara Seals reports: A phishing campaign targeting utility grid operators uses a PDF attachment to deliver spyware. A phishing campaign that spoofs a PDF attachment to deliver Adwind spyware has been taking aim at national grid utilities infrastructure. Adwind, a.k.a. JRAT or SockRat, is being used in a malware-as-a-service model in this campaign, researchers said….
Hospice of San Joaquin discloses ransomware attack
The Hospice of San Joaquin recently notified the California Attorney General’s Office that it had suffered a ransomware attack on July 2. The notification, signed by Rebecca Burnett, their CEO, states that: The data accessed may have included personal information such as full name, patient ID number, diagnoses, home address and other sensitive information. Though…
Texas DIR issues update on coordinated ransomware attack on multiple government agencies
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) is leading the response to a ransomware attack against entities across Texas. Below is an update as of August 20, 2019, at approximately 3:00 p.m. central time. The number of confirmed impacted entities has been reduced to twenty-two. As of the time of this release, responders have engaged…