Posted on 02/02/2017 5:43:43 PM PST by markomalley
In another interesting example of what happens when you don’t manage your backups correctly, the Licking County government offices, including the police force, have been shut down by ransomware. Although details are sparse, it’s clear that someone in the office caught a bug in a phishing scam or by downloading it and now their servers are locked up.
Wrote Kent Mallett of the Newark Advocate:
The virus, accompanied by a financial demand, is labeled ransomware, which has hit several local governments in Ohio and was the subject of a warning from the state auditor last summer.
All county offices remain open, but online access and landline telephones are not available for those on the county system. The shutdown is expected to continue at least the rest of the week.
The county government offices, including 911 dispatch, currently must work without computers or office phones. “The public can still call 911 for emergency police, fire or medical response,” wrote Mallett.
These sorts of attacks are becoming more commonplace and, as mentioned before, can be avoided with good backup practices. Sadly not every computer in every hospital, county office or police department is connected to a nicely journaled and spacious hard drive, so these things will happen more and more. Luckily it improves cryptocurrency popularity as these small office finally give up and buy bitcoin to pay their ransom.
County Auditor Mike Smith saw the bright side.
“Apparently, our clock still works,” he told the Newark Advocate.
And of course, they have never heard of Linux -or even if they have heard of it, of course they need to run the latest version of WinDoze and MS Office. (/s)
No sympathies here.
Almost 30 years of running Linux, and not a single version of malware or ransomware has ever struck any of the machines I work with that are running it.
Someone needs to mail them a clue.
>>the Licking County government offices<<
Irony is ironic.
These criminals can’t be found?
Need to get Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call after them.
I had a ransomware problem on my computer about a month ago.
It popped up on the screen and told me I had to do X before my computer would operate. It look all official, like Microsoft was watching over me. It was going to cost me to buy something. I thought, screw this...
I shut down. The first time it didn’t boot properly.
I shut down again. That time it booted properly.
Haven’t had a bit of trouble since.
I may have booted up in the safe mode at one point, possibly the second attempt. In that case, I had to reboot three times.
At any rate, things are fine now.
Inside job to sabotage . Just bring over a 12 year and they’ll fix in like 5 minutes
>>Someone needs to mail them a clue.<<
Still too many things depend on Windows or Mac.
Linux is a great server OS but the deployment as desktop software is close to zero.
For example, I don’t know if Exchange Server runs on Linux (quick Googles says no) but that is an example of an enterprise App that is relied on heavily.
No excuse for not having regular solid backups.
None at all. The CIO should be fired and no on in their right mind should ever hire him/her.
These criminals can’t be found?
***************************************
I saw a whole segment on these criminals. They even have a customer service number to walk you through the process. It is amazing that they find them.
It says right in the article “their servers are locked up”.
As for Exchange, it is the MS email server. You don’t use a MS email server on Linux, you use an open-source emai server.
I have had one and only one ransomware attack - yep Windows box in the cloud. We were in the middle of an initial build so no blood no foul. Just killed the VM and started over. Did move around the app install order so that the firewall and virus software got installed first.
I have installed and seen hundreds to thousands of Linux servers.
There are alternatives to Exchange Server.
https://www.ssl.com/projects/alternatives-to-microsoft-exchange-server/
Zimbra is very solid.
But you need Exchange capabilities (beyond simple MAPI) in many corporate environments - things like hot linking to Skype and MS Directory, etc. etc. etc.
It ain’t pretty but it is very true.
Interestingly it got the name from salt licks. I guess there were some big licks and a lot of lickers.
Malwarebytes.
You'd be surprised at how many 'doze equivalents exist on the linux OS these days. Some things, I agree, still have no acceptable equivalent but workarounds such as Wine on linux help out quite a bit in that regard.
Unfortunately far too many office drones and salesweenies think they absolutely HAVE to have MS Word and other WinOffice programs to work with since that is all they are familiar with to write their memos and reports, or work with their spreadsheets and databases.
Linux has excellent equivalents for such work, and has maintained continual backwards version support as well despite MS refusing to do so in an effort to force everyone who uses their products to upgrade.
I exaggerate, but not by much. Slackware has been around the longest, but honestly people were playing about with Linus Torvalds' first dabblings with what he had written for quite some time before the first official release ever saw the light of day.
I first started out playing with several versions back in 1995, went with Red Hat 4.3, and then later bought My first official boxed set of Linux ever: Red Hat 5.0. It came in a very nicely printed and sealed set and included not only the install CD but also a bound and printed Operator's Handbook which taught Me quite a bit about linux commands as well as effectively using the CLI and how to go about tweaking the GUI interface so I could set it up on many different machines.
I was hooked. :0)
There's the rub. If it's that critical, what I have done in the past is set up a server machine that addresses the program in question and then configure the other machine on the network to work on their own and only send data to the central node. The satellite machines in the various offices do not need to have a full-blown installation 'doze OS to access the databases present in Corporate Central.
Skype is available in Linux, and as far as the MS Directory need is concerned, that is purely a corporate (lazy) decision as any IT boffin can set up a company-wide directory not dependent upon the MS ghouls and then convert it if/as necessary. Just takes a bit of effort, then.
Oh really? Try looking up these:
1. Mint
2. Debian
3. Ubuntu
4. openSUSE
5. Manjaro
6. elementary
7. Fedora
8. Zorin
9. deepin
10. CentOS
...
Those are just the first ten most popular versions available today and the number 1 distro, Mint linux, is averaging 2786 downloads per day as I type this, which is down a bit from other days.
Then you might wish to do a search (ixquick.com) on the three major Window Managers a version like Mint provides: KDE, Gnome, and Cinnamon. There are many others.
You might be surprised.
Cheers.
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