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Time Bomb May Have Destroyed 800 Norfolk City PCs' Data
krebsonsecurity writes "The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date, according to krebsonsecurity.com. 'We don't believe it came in from the Internet. We don't know how it got into our system,' the city's IT director said. 'We speculate it could have been a time bomb waiting until a date or time to trigger. Whatever it was, it essentially destroyed these machines.'"
It's Naw-Fuck.
And it's nowhere near as embarrassing as how we pronounce Buena Vista.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I wonder if there is any correlation between the number of PCs that crashed and the number of PCs set to automatically download and install patches...
Hardly. It's just something that messed with the Win32 folder. This could be fixed by a few temps over the weekend if the city government was half-competent.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
if they were running backups, they wouldn't be scratching their heads and behaving completely ignorant of what exactly it was or when it was put in. They obviously lost everything, which I'm sorry but I find some darwinism/justice in that. If you don't even have a backup to look at to see what it was sitting on the hard drive waiting to blow up, you're just beyond help. Maybe better luck next time.
But too many out there simply must learn their lessons the hard way. That will never change.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
As to why they couldn't just boot to linux or a recovery CD and salvage the data....
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
So the data is wiped because the System32 folder is fucked up? Uh-huh... guess they have to throw out all those computers and order new ones. Looks like the data's gone forever.
mmmm...forbidden donut
We've instituted offsite backups, both over the tubes and physically taking images of our servers (all virtualized of course) offsite to a bank safety deposit box. If, for whatever reason, the whole damned building explodes tomorrow, we've got the data sitting on servers in two other geographically distant locations. But if we can't get to those, we have the VM images, so as long as we can get our hands on a server capable of running Linux KVM, we could be up and running in short order (I estimate 3-4 hours, including host OS installation).
The days when a physical or digital attack can fuck the whole organization are gone. There are enough traditional and newer backup schemes out there that even long downtimes aren't necessary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
IT specialists for the city found that the system serving as the distribution point for the malware within the city’s network was a print server that handles printing jobs for Norfolk City Hall. However, an exact copy of the malware on that server may never be recovered, as city computer technicians quickly isolated and rebuilt the offending print server. “Obviously, our first reaction was to shut it down and restore services, and at least initially we weren’t concerned about capturing [the malware] or setting it aside,” Cluff said.
Obviously, your reaction was wrong in every way. When a system is compromised you physically unplug it from the network and keep it powered on so that you can run forensics on it. Good work destroying any evidence you might have had about not only who performed this attack, but what weakness in your security they exploited to accomplish it. All that just to get a print server of all things back online as fast as possible.
You got it. it's also a great example of how incompetent most City's IT staff are, Hey municipalities... you get what you pay for. How's those $25,000 a year IT staff working out for ya?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From working in the backup industry for years, I'm sure they have backups, the problem is that they never tried to verify or restore them. but is there really isn't any data there, compression is great when you just "tar cv * > /dev/null" ...
Heck one time I had a guy who was getting Parity Errors decide that the best way to solve them was to just shut off Parity Checking... Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Seriously I can't count the number of times I tried to help someone restore their backups after a critical loss that turned out to never have actually verified that they worked in the first place. Just as bad as when I worked in a photo shop and someone said they couldn't get their film out... put the camera in the light locked compartment, stuck my hands in, just to find that he had taken 36 'priceless vacation pictures' on the back of the camera body instead of film.
-=JML=-
From TFA:
Free Martian Whores!
* Check every few seconds to see if network goes down
* Write a bogus entry in the log files that points to some oddball behavior, like a disk-read error or something
* If network is down freeze screen so it looks like computer just locked up
* Ignore all input
* Wipe key parts of disk so forensic recovery is impossible or at least very difficult
* Wipe key parts of memory so forensic recovery is impossible or at least very difficult
* Wipe key parts of cache so forensic recovery is impossible or at least very difficult
* Force or fake a BSOD screen so a casual user will think his computer crashed and blame any resulting data loss on the crash
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.