Ransomware

As part of a recent ransomware attack on the police department of Washington, D.C., cyber criminals released sensitive information on about two dozen officers. Experts say hackers can be serious threats to public safety.

Faced with mounting pressure to return to normal gasoline and jet fuel production levels, Colonial Pipeline Co. reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to the Eastern European hacking group this week.

Patients in San Diego, Calif., are facing substantial roadblocks to their health care as Scripps Health, the second-largest health system in the region, remains relatively silent about a recovery plan.

Federal authorities are investigating the recent ransomware attack that forced Colonial Pipeline to shut down its operations. President Joe Biden said evidence suggests the cyber criminals may reside in Russia.

Colonial Pipeline, a Georgia-based company, shut down its gas pipeline system after a ransomware attack compromised some of its IT systems. The pipeline provides just less than half of all gas consumed on the East Coast.

Federal ransomware-fighting efforts are held back when corporate victims don’t report or accept their help. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce-convened panel examined the concerns that keep SMBs from reaching out.

A recent report from software firm VMWare Carbon Black estimates that its health-care customers experienced a 9,851 percent increase in hacking attempts in 2020 compared to the previous year.

Ransomware is now a national security threat, and states and municipalities require more resources to fight back effectively. A recent Congressional hearing looks to identify their financial and strategic needs.

The Institute for Security and Technology-coordinated Ransomware Task Force calls for viewing ransomware as far more than just financial crime and making combating it a global priority.

Scripps Health has not publicly confirmed that ransomware caused the outage, though an internal memo implicates the attack vector. The attack disrupted scheduling, patient records and other critical systems.

In February, a state audit indicated that the Illinois Attorney General's Office lacked proper cybersecurity protections. Three weeks ago, the office suffered a ransomware attack.

A ransomware attack caused a disruption last week for Park Hill School District in Kansas City, Mo., but the district opted to work with the FBI and recover on its own using backups instead of paying the ransom.

If using ransomware becomes a state crime, do officials have the resources to investigate and prosecute the individuals responsible for launching the attacks? That’s where it gets complicated.

Cooperative support services and cloud backups helped the district recover from a ransomware attack on Friday, which didn’t affect student information or grades but targeted servers. The FBI is still investigating.

Leaders within the Buffalo, N.Y., Public Schools were taken by surprise by the ransomware attack that afflicted the district's network on Friday, but security experts say they shouldn't have been.

Yuba County systems were recently targeted by a cyberattack that forced IT staff to isolate affected computers to stop the malware. Officials say critical systems had backups and were successfully recovered.

A small number of criminal cases in Albany, N.Y., were affected by a 2019 ransomware attack against the city’s servers, causing the police department to lose digital copies of its 2018 internal affairs files.

Baltimore County public school representatives delivered a letter to district leaders, stating the lack of transparency and communication following the recent ransomware attack is “wreaking havoc upon havoc.”