January 30, 2018 Incidents of cyber extortion have risen steadily over the past couple of years and, by many estimates, will continue to be a major source of disruption for many organizations. Cyber extortion can take many forms, but it typically involves cybercriminals’ demanding money to stop (or in some cases, to merely delay) their…
Category: Malware
More than half of ransomware victims hit at least twice
Tony Morbin reports: New research on ransomware by Sophos reveals that the average total cost of an attack is US$ 133,000 (£94,000), including ransom, downtime, manpower, device cost, network cost, and lost opportunities – but for the top five percent most impacted organisations, costs were US$1.3 million to US$6.6 million (£900,000 to £4.7 million). More…
SC school district latest victim to ransomware
Kendall Morris reports: A South Carolina school district is the latest victim to ransomware. Chester County School District posted on its Facebook page Monday that ransomware hit the district’s servers over the weekend. The post went on to say that no data has been taken or breached, and it has a specialist on site to…
Hackers Behind Dridex Also Created FriedEx Ransomware
ESET reports: In a new blog post researchers from ESET researchers reveal that that the authors behind the infamous Dridex banking trojan are also behind the high-profile, sophisticated ransomware variant FriedEx. The ransomware was discovered in early July 2017 by Michael Gillespie. In August, it returned to the spotlight and made headlines by infecting NHS hospitals in Scotland. FriedEx…
Ontario Progressive Conservative Party database hacked: Sources
CP24 reports that the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s internal database was locked up by a ransomware attack in early November. The incident is first being acknowledged now, it seems. The database contains the names, phone numbers and other personal information of over a million eligible voters in the province, as well as party supporters, donors…
Allscripts Hit with Class-Action Complaint After Ransomware Attack
Can’t say that I’m surprised, not after reading that practices were having to turn patients away because they couldn’t access their patient records or billing records. Rajiv Leventhal reports that a class action complaint has been filed against Allscripts: It was just last week when electronic health record (EHR) vendor Allscripts suffered a ransomware attack…