Posted on 05/03/2023 5:52:04 PM PDT by dynachrome
The City of Dallas confirmed that a ransomware attack compromised a number of servers in its system, including the Dallas Police Department's website.
Late Monday morning, CBS News Texas' J.D. Miles reported that the outage impacted the department's computer assisted dispatch system, called CAD, which directs police to emergencies and other calls.
The issue forced 911 call takers to manually write down instructions for the responding officers, who were only able to respond through their phones and radios.
CBS News Texas obtained an image the ransomware note. The hackers claim that they encrypted the city's critical data, and threatened to post sensitive information online.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
We cannot extradite them in most circumstances. Once in a while the local governments will turn over a few of them or shut them down in exchange for other favors.
The sponsors have a more effective control program. If the criminal clients go after unapproved Russian targets instead of American and European targets, the Russians have cleanup teams who hunt down the gang members and kill them all.
Transactions from all of the major cryptocurrency systems are trackable to organizations with the resources of a national government. Gangs who do make a big score get identified fairly quickly. They stay in operation because they are protected by their local governments.
The gangs have relatively short lifespans. Sort of like a pickup basketball game, the players come and go. A few of them make big scores, the rest of them cannot make a living at it. They leave the game with a bunch of stories they cannot safely tell anybody.
We are really going to regret not remembering how to do things without a computer.
Many things simply didn’t get done without a computer. Two sides of the same coin.
Maybe the City of Dallas should have hired competent IT staff instead of paying for any of a number of idiot boondoggles they’ve created in recent years.
Could even be American software. Remember, the NSA lost control of the US cybernetic ‘nuclear arsenal’ under Obama and never figured out where it went. So all those nice tools provided by Microsoft and others are now out there floating around.
That is possible.
The key is in the distribution network. The gangs that use this stuff do not usually write it. They buy it. The old applications do not work as well as the newer versions because of evolving defenses.
Ten-year old applications from the NSA/CIA etc. probably aren't going to work unless somebody has been keeping them up to date. That takes real smart people and consistent, steady funding.
The gangs don't have either.
As with the California gold rush, the people who make the most money and last the longest in the ransomware enterprise are the suppliers. Those people have the explicit support from various governments and their controlling oligarchs who are hostile to the US.
Think of it as "5th generation warfare".
[ransomware attack]
2 of these happened, one the day I got there and another a few weeks later (job I took in 2014).
I tried explaining it to the local yokels. I had never dealt with this stuff before. First computer I confiscated and never let it go live again. Second computer I was about to confiscate after shutting it down.
With a note on the screen: DO NOT RESTART
Went back to my office to deal with something. What do I find upon my return? My boss and the plant manager have restarted the computer and are trying to transfer email to the head engineer.
It was like talking to a pile of bricks.
I gave up because the situation was beyond hopeless in so many ways. I had hope.
Truly one of the most unsophisticated I/T operations I had ever seen in my life. THE most, actually. Absolutely not a single clue about corporate best practices.
The funniest one I saw where I worked was an early one. “nude pics of anna kornikova. Click here.” My boss and I watched the virus fill up the email system repeatedly as people who should have known better clicked on it.
Oops!!
Wanna Get Away?
🤪😜🤣😆😂
The AP report fails to tell the “How” — Of likely how the criminals gained access to make the attack. Just everything else is talked about, but the “how.”
How do you prevent without knowing the “how”???
Ransomware criminals are dumping kids’ private files online after school hacks
https://apnews.com/article/schools-ransomware-data-breach-40ebeda010158f04a1ef14607bfed9b0
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, districts prioritized spending on internet connectivity and remote learning. Security got short shrift as IT departments invested in software to track student engagement and performance, often at the expense of privacy and safety, University of Chicago and New York University researchers found.
In a 2023 survey, the Consortium for School Networking, a tech-oriented nonprofit, found just 16% of districts had full-time network security staff, with nearly nearly half devoting 2% or less of their IT budgets to security.”
Can’t fix stupid.
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