Virginia Health Database Held For Ransom

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post's Security Fix is reporting that hackers broke into servers at the Virginia health department that monitors prescription drug abuse and replaced the homepage with a ransom demand. The attackers claimed they had deleted the backups, and demanded $10 million for the return of prescription data on more than 8 million Virginians. Virginia isn't saying much about the attacks at the moment, except to acknowledge that they've involved the FBI, and that they've shut down e-mail and a whole mess of servers for the state department of health professionals. The Post piece credits Wikileaks as the source, which has a copy of the ransom note left behind by the attackers."

Comments

Re:Shouldn't be hard to re-create

[forand]

How is this insightful? Funny maybe but not insightful.

Re:Non-story?

[Pederson]

No. Just, no. Seriously, are you that much of a conforming zero that you strive for others to control even MORE aspects of your life? People have licenses for things such as driving because any idiot can jump into a car, and run over ten people. However, not any idiot can jump on a computer and deface a government hosted site/database. Also, I'm fairly certain you don't need a license to use a PC, watch/own TV, or develop software. Sad, so sad. Some people here have the right idea. Yeah, this guy is an idiot and he's doing wrong. However, ultimately good will come of this. Hopefully companies (and more importantly public services/data) will understand the need for security and seriously look at the field (which creates jobs for guys like me.. when I get out of school).