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US School Agrees To Pay $8,500 To Get Rid Of Ransomware (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, the media was abuzz with the case of the Hollywood hospital that almost shut down its operations because of a ransomware infection, which it eventually paid. Something similar happened around the same time in a South Carolina school district when ransomware shut down an elementary school's servers. The school had to pay $8,500.
older server running outdated equipment. Well the Republicans failed to fund the IT newer hardware and software.
You start paying, they find more targets, make their scam more professional, etc. At the moment, these are still common criminals, as can be seen by the low sums demanded (completely out of proportion compared to the damage done), but that will now change.
The good thing is that Bitcoin is not really anonymous, unlike the common wisdom. With a bit of lick these people will be identified. The bad thing is that it will take some time and by then others will have copied the scam.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"The school's IT staff said the ransomware penetrated their network through an older server running outdated equipment."
And proceeded to propagate through their network through newer servers running outdated equipment...
Don't step on the baby.
It should be illegal to pay ransomware criminals.
Horry County school district (South Carolina, US). Got it! Thanks for the tip ;-)
At least banks and other victim institutions keep the whole thing secret. Great idea to render it public.
Another funny part in TFA:
Coincidentally, when the ransomware incident happened, the school's administration was looking into hiring an outside security provider.
What if it wasn't coincidental?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So when are we going to start including ransomware into the total cost of ownership?
Have any technical articles been posted on what all of these 'servers' were running?
Do we really want to be teaching children to negotiate with terrorists?
The obvious way around that is to stop calling everyone who breathes a "terrorist".
For me to do my offline backups.
What is the typical attack vector for something like this? I understand how it might affect a home users own computers either by visiting malicious websites, or being unconcerned with what one runs that was downloaded from ithe Internet, but how does a place like a school get hit?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So many useless, off-topic posts in this thread by political trolls; what's up with that? You shits have an issue with political candidates or parties, take it up at the polls, not by shitposting on Slashdot. Anyway..
Is anyone going to learn from these unfortunate incidents? There is no excuse for there not being decent security precautions and procedures in the IT department of any organization, and there likewise is no excuse for there not being adequate incremental backups of critical systems. Basically this school and the hospital in Hollywood were sloppy, and criminals capitalized (literally) on their sloppiness.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Perhaps people will start to take computer security seriously, if they see that it has an immediate impact on their budgets.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
God dammit, when I heard my elementary school got hacked I thought I was finally going to be able to get out from under the pernicious shadow of my Permanent Record!
It would be better if it became the habit to spend money on security. That $8500 would have gone a long way towards decent security measures.
One wonders, though, what an elementary school district needs with 25 servers (or more; tfa says 25 were affected). What was so mission critical that it was worth paying cash to get back? Why not just format the affected machines, reinstall, and be done with it? The database that says litte Timmy got a B last year just aren't mission critical.
We almost have tourist defined as terrorist too but Egypt is farther along in that aspect than we are in the US
http://news.antiwar.com/2015/0...
Although I think we will have that figured out within the next 10 years.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
... someone stole my slide rule. I had to pay them 1s and 6d to get it back. How times have changed!
One wonders, though, what an elementary school district needs with 25 servers
There are a lot of federal dollars available for things like "computers in the classroom" and "cops in schools" that don't really make much sense, but, hey, it's free money, and can't be used for anything else. The elementary school that my kid attends has a $250,000 Cisco enterprise system that handles less traffic than the $39 Netgear router that I have at home. A federal grant paid for it, and on top of that, Cisco made a nice donation to the enrichment program, so it was a no-brainer.
Seriously, as long as groups/companies insist on running windows and offshoring the work, they will continue to be hit by ransomware and others.
Several decades ago, America used to be concerned about Security. Now, it is a joke.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...Why not just format the affected machines, reinstall, and be done with it? ...
It could be an inside job too.
Anyone else read that as Horny County?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Based on the number of phishing emails I see weekly I doubt people are ever going to learn. Stuff like this is done because it works and has been working for decades.
Perl Programmer for hire
You could fit a typical student record on a 3x5 card ... suck it up and just tell the crooks to go pound sand.
Assuming that payroll wasn't handled by one of the servers affected...
But there is good news too! We can be unpussified by following a few simple steps: http://www.welivesecurity.com/...
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
What if they were to just format the affected machines, restore from the latest backup prior to the intrusion, and be done...
Oh, wait.
load "linux",8,1
Several thousand employees perhaps. School Districts are big employers who also have lawyers, accountants, business analysts, and shared drive and applications too just like the private sector.
http://saveie6.com/
... what about good backups?!
Just last week, one of my co-workers attended a Cisco seminar where they were peddling an "all inclusive" system to try to stop malware, and especially ransomware. It involved software you had to load on all of the clients, server-side software and special firewall type gear, all to try to "proactively stop ransomware from phoning home or uploading content anyplace". The price tag, obviously, was pretty steep as well.
Pulling his buddy, who worked at Cisco, aside for a minute, he asked, "If you have good backups, wouldn't all of this be pretty much unnecessary?" His friend smiled and nodded in agreement.
We use CrashPlan ProE where I work, backing up all of the client PC and Mac desktop folder contents in pretty much real-time, to the backup servers we designated for them based on the offices they operate out of. The servers themselves replicate to other servers at our other locations, for off-site backup copies, as well as a big chunk of the content we actively used getting stored on DropBox (where it's also possible to restore backups of deleted files or folders, or to go back to earlier versions if needed, using the backup and restore capabilities they provide business users).
As a general rule, if anyone was infected with ransomwarre that encrypted their data, we'd just wipe it and go to the latest good backup, and be back up and running with very little lost data (if any). Absolutely no reason to pay one of these hackers to unlock the stuff for us.
It seems to me that if you've got $8,500 to pay the ransom, then you had $8,500 to invest in some backup infrastructure instead....
Once you add in benefits, pensions, overhead, and management, $50k is $100k. Burdened employment costs tend to be higher for governments, and even higher for public schools.
Software As A Service ?
Not me, I first thought it was a misspelling of "Whory".
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When I left school (yes, it was a while ago) the computers were used to make things easier, but the permenant record was still printed every year and stored in file cabinets. A loss of the computer would cause re-work for the current year's teachers, and delays for those ordering transcripts, but no data loss would happen if every computer were stolen or wiped tomorrow.
Learn to love Alaska
The schools don't even know what CIPA is or how to meet it. The only one I know that even tried was given official complaint and was about to start the fine phase, before they got outside help to meet the law. Then they paid 10x what they needed to, to bring in an outside firm and put in basic filtering.
Learn to love Alaska
It would be better if it became the habit to spend money on security...
Also, on VERY frequent offline backups using increasingly cheap mass storage options. And possibly even duplicate server racks. Get a call from your neighbourhood data extortionist? Take the servers offline, patch the hole, restore from backups or switch over to the second rack, and tell the extortionists to fuck off.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If I made ransomware I'd put in a six month delay so even if you had a backup you'd lose six months of work.
What was the name of the computer Operating system this ransomware ran on?
"It would be better if it became the habit to spend money on security."
And backups. $8500 buys a pretty decent box to run Bacula on.
Assuming it encrypted the stuff for 6 months, then refused to hand it over when you ran a DB query, etc.
If it's offering up unencrypted data for 6 months then you have 6 months of unencrypted data to work from until it locked the thing last week.
You could fit a typical student record on a 3x5 card ... suck it up and just tell the crooks to go pound sand.
Assuming that payroll wasn't handled by one of the servers affected...
Housed in the elementary school, instead of at the district level?
In any case, if they can't piece together what they were paying people ... sheesh.
Or a reliable backup system.
One of our senior management got hit by one of these, and since he had access all the different network shares, did quite a bit of damage.
Something over 37,000 files restored from the backups later and no ransom had to go anywhere.