Ransomware Infects All St Louis Public Library Computers (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Libraries in St Louis have been bought to a standstill after computers in all the city's libraries were infected with ransomware, a particularly virulent form of computer virus used to extort money from victims. Hackers are demanding $35,000 (£28,000) to restore the system after the cyberattack, which affected 700 computers across the Missouri city's 16 public libraries. The hackers demanded the money in electronic currency bitcoin, but, as CNN reports, the authority has refused to pay for a code that would unlock the machines. As a result, the library authority has said it will wipe its entire computer system and rebuild it from scratch, a solution that may take weeks. On Friday, St Louis public library announced it had managed to regain control of its servers, with tech staff continuing to work to restore borrowing services. The 16 libraries have all remained open, but computers continue to be off limits to the public. Spokeswoman Jen Hatton told CNN that the attack had hit the city's schoolchildren and its poor worst, as many do not have access to the internet at home. "For many [...] we're their only access to the internet," she said. "Some of them have a smartphone, but they don't have a data plan. They come in and use the wifi." As well as causing the loans system to seize up, preventing borrowers from checking out or returning books, the attack froze all computers, leaving no one able to access the four million items that should be available through the service. The system is believed to have been infected through a centralized computer server, and staff emails have also been frozen by the virus. The FBI has been called in to investigate.

Comments

Why do people keep using Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

After two decades of this crap, you'd think they would learn.

Re: Why do people keep using Windows?

[TWX]

That's not really it at all.

Decision-makers at the top of organizations love Windows. They love Microsoft. They love all of the pretty graphs and charts and menus that make it look easy to administer a system or network. The problem is, they often start to think that they actually know how to do just that once they've been through the marketing experience meetings where the people from the vendor with a lot of knowledge make it look so simple, or else they hire people that do a very convincing job of sounding like they know what they're doing but don't. Worst, those people (either the bosses or the ignorant hirees) may be convinced that they know what they're doing far beyond reality.

Now, I will give it this much, sometimes the GUI tools can be useful. It's much easier to plot how network traffic is being passed among multiple interfaces to the WAN or to the ISP across multiple NAT firewalls with a GUI graph than it is on a text console. On the other hand, actually figuring out what's going on is often a function of the console, rather than of the GUI.

Good for St. Louis

[Anonymous Coward]

As a St. Louisan, I'm glad they're not paying. It sounds like there are some serious issues while they restore their systems, but it sounds like they do have backups. It will take awhile to clean up the mess, but I applaud them for not giving in to the criminals responsible for this. Although many articles aren't clear about this, the library did have backups to restore from, so despite the security breach, someone knew what they were doing well enough to avoid paying the ransom demands. Good for St. Louis not giving into these demands.

Re:Reading between the lines...

[Rick Schumann]

Being a public library, it's not like they have to have backups for every single computer either. Most if not all of their workstations, including especially the ones intended for public access, would just be paved over with a standard image, and pretty much also for employee workstations. Only their server(s) would really be affected, right? So long as they have backup(s) they'd be fine.

Re:Reading between the lines...

[Anonymous Coward]

My bet is they are well accustomed to re-imaging the public facing computers.

Re:I'm Angry

[HiThere]

I think you think this was a targeted attack, but personally I really doubt that. I think it was a target of opportunity seized by some automated bot. Which doesn't mean you should think more kindly of those who released it.