Posted on 06/21/2019 1:56:41 AM PDT by Libloather
A small city in Florida has agreed to pay nearly $600,000 in bitcoin ransom to hackers who took control of its computer systems in a ransomware attack, according to reports.
The Riviera Beach City Council on Monday unanimously approved its insurance carrier to pay 65 bitcoin — valued at about $592,000 — in hopes of regaining full access to its network, the Palm Beach Post reported.
The attack two weeks ago wiped out the city’s entire computer system. The city council was left without email and phone service, direct-deposit paychecks had to be hand-delivered instead and the police department had to change over to paper tickets for traffic citations.
The police and fire departments also had to write down 911 calls, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. They receive about 280 calls a day.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Yup. Good IT practices would have minimized the impact of this. Backups are important.
A properly designed computer system will NOT execute code in email attachments. Of course, they are probably using MS-Windows extensively within their office, so that rules out the concept of a properly designed computer system. The entire concept of a file being executable based on its file name is insanity of the highest order.
Our company had ransomware on a network server. The fix was to use a backup to restore. The cause was a email file someone had opened.
One who come in on 95 going to Singer Island (riviera beach beach island)
And has never been through Riviera Beach to get to Singer island are amazed
What a crap hole
When I worked for a software development company, we had three backup drives for every drive. One was a clone of the system with all software installed, one was a week old clone, usually done sat pm/sunday am, and the other was an overnite clone of the drive. Most malware doesn’t wait for a week. But you are right, you can’t fix stupid users. all our very private work was on a physically isolated intranet, and anything from outside ran on a test computer before we would transfer it over. And as always Unix security rules.
ff
Why would stupid employees follow a plan? They are going to click on attachments. They are going to visit malicious sites. And that's assuming they are not disgruntled. If they are disgruntled, they will install malware on purpose.
Most if not all of those issues can solved with a proper security policy...
I’ve worked in some major corporations that did not allow access to the Internet except to approved sites and also would not allow attachments to be opened, software to be installed or removable hard drives to be plugged in....it can be done, but the average organization doesn’t have the expertise or nerve to force these things onto people..
Yes, they are. Intranet is internet among various government offices. To do that, they have to use internet platforms and applications.
I have a long-time friend who operates at the highest of Internet security levels and he posed the SAME thoughts and questions your post #24 stated.
Well you said it yourself, it’s not really useful to cut off the internet and even whitelisted sites can be hacked or have malware uploaded into them. Disallowing thumb drives and those other measures are plausible with limited permission Windows accounts. But it’s not exactly futuristic and does not inspire innovation.
Reflash everything first.
Intranet is exclusive to an organization, building, etc. It could encompass multiple buildings across the world, but it doesn’t connect to the outside world.
I understand. They still use platforms and software apps that the internet uses. Really easy to put something out there that doesn’t belong.
Do you realize how many services the public can perform in communication with the government? All of those can easily be hacked and then voila, hackers are into government platforms and applications ripe for manipulation.
Have you ever renewed your vehicle’s registration on line?
I don’t own a vehicle, so I wouldn’t know what that’s like.
Don’t patronize me. Admit you’re wrong.
How am I wrong?
A gov’t entity today wouldn’t survive by disallowing internet services.
All I said was that I don’t have a vehicle and have never needed to use an online registration service, and you then said I was patronizing you.
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