Medical facilities and hospitals across the state of Victoria in Australia were infected by file-encrypting ransomware on Monday, causing the shutdown of patient booking systems and financial systems. At least one hospital has reverted to using paper-based systems.
"Cyberattacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today," reads gaming company Zynga's data breach notification, thus breaking the first rule of crisis management: Own your mistakes. Hacker Gnosticplayers claims the company was still storing passwords using outdated SHA1.
The city of Baltimore's ransomware outbreak - $18 million in costs and counting - led to many crypto-locked files being lost forever, because no IT policy mandated centralized file backups. But effective IT solutions exist to help solve this challenge, provided they're deployed in advance of an attack.
A ransomware attack late last week on a county hospital in rural Wyoming was still causing patient care disruptions on Monday. Some patients were sent more than 125 miles away to other area hospitals for treatment.
Ahead of the release of Edward Snowden's memoirs chronicling his decision to bring illegal "big data" domestic U.S. surveillance programs to light, a former NSA intelligence specialist points out that the U.S. still lacks a whistleblowing law to protect intelligence workers who spot illegal activity.
Ransomware-wielding attackers treat infecting endpoints as a business and put customer relationship management principles to work, says Bill Siegel, CEO of ransomware incident response firm Coveware. He notes criminals "go after the low-hanging fruit because it's cheap and the conversion rate is high."
The ransomware blitz against the healthcare sector continues: A Utah clinic has reported an attack that potentially affected 320,000 patients, making it one of the largest breaches of its kind so far this year.
Earlier this year, intruders probed weaknesses in the network firewalls of a U.S. power utility to attempt a distributed denial-of-service attack, but there was no disruption in electricity service, according a recently released report. The incident illustrates potential weaknesses in the power grid.
Three weeks after a ransomware attack slammed 22 Texas municipalities' systems, state officials say more than half of the cities have returned to normal operations and the rest have advanced to system restoration. Meanwhile, officials have shared lessons learned for managed service providers and customers.
Schools in Flagstaff, Arizona, were closed on Thursday after ransomware appeared on the district's network. Friday's classes were called off while the recovery effort continued.
The mayor of New Bedford, Massachusetts, took the unusual step this week of holding a press conference to describe a recent ransomware attack and explain why the city decided not to pay the $5.3 million ransom that was demanded.
Do criminal organizations prefer to target organizations that hold cyber insurance policies? A ProPublica report suggests that because cyber insurance policyholders are more likely to pay ransoms, they're a more frequent target. But some cybersecurity experts have expressed skepticism.
Ransomware-wielding attackers continue to target not just big businesses and large government agencies, but increasingly their smaller counterparts too. In Texas, officials say a campaign tied to a "single threat actor" infected 22 local government agencies on Friday.
To explore how credential stuffing attacks and brute force attacks differ, we need to understand what they are and how they operate. Here is a quick summary.
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