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Alaskan Town Finds Solace in Typewriters Following Last Week's BitPaymer Ransomware Infection (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: On Monday, officials from Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su), a borough part of the Anchorage Metropolitan Statistical Area, said they are still recovering from a ransomware infection that took place last week, on July 24. The ransomware infection crippled the Borough's government networks and has led to the IT staff shutting down a large swath of affected IT systems. [...] Officials said they were planning to clean and reinstall 650 desktop computers and servers located on the parts of the Mat-Su network believed to be affected. [...] "Without computers and files, Borough employees acted resourcefully," said Mat-Su Public Affairs Director Patty Sullivan last week. "They re-enlisted typewriters from closets, and wrote by hand receipts and lists of library book patrons and landfill fees at some of the 73 different buildings." Mat-Su IT Director Eric Wyatt identified the "virus" as the BitPaymer ransomware earlier this week, the report said.
...from what I understand no payment was made...backups were ok, even if a year old
nothing to see here - move along
Maybe switch to Linux. How many more times does this need to happen before somebody gets a clue?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
... you can see Russia from Mat-Su, so ... maybe the ransomware was transmitted by IR.
Nice to see some people in this country aren't so dependent on high technology that they can still operate without it.
Maybe, the MatSu government needs to hire some competent IT management. Really stuff like this should not happen as competent staff will take proactive approaches to systems and network security.
hire mercenaries on Silk road to hunt down the ransoming thieves and bring them to justice. Start a kickstarter to pay for it.
all that lovely ransom-ware just waiting to get on...
As a taxpayer and American citizen, I am appalled that they did not pay the ransom. You must always pay the ransom or the price of unlocking will go up to account for this. These hackers are providing a wonderful service by illuminating the flaws in systems. Donâ(TM)t want to be ransomed, then secure your systems. Not paying the ransom is the same as theft.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I prefer to focus on the positive, as does the Mat-Su Public Affairs Director. Sure the ransomware hit wasn't supposed to happen, but what if it does anyway? Can you deny that malware frequently targets users, social behavior, and employees trying to "do the right thing" nowadays?
Thus, this stuff happens, despite all our best efforts. It's better that the users have some resilience and ingenuity when an outage occurs, rather than acting all helpless and like IT has to fix everything. Haul out those typewriters and serve the public dammit!
That gives IT some breathing room to repair the damage and just maybe, everyone learns something from the event.
... and explain how the ransomware entered the system.
Was it email phishing or malicious website, a direct attack through an exploit?
All this shit about moving to Linux and stuff is radical given that any weak entry points are not OS-related.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Power failures. When I lived in the boonies, power failures were pretty frequent. They usually lasted a few seconds to a few minutes, so I bought UPSes and figured I was safe.
Then one night during a storm, the power went out. My UPSes kicked in, but the power didn't come back for more than 10 minutes. So I shut down my desktop and switched to my laptop. But 45 minutes in I lost Internet (I figure the cable company's battery backups ran out). No problem, I could chill for a few hours playing games on my laptop connected to a 12V car battery I kept around for such emergencies. Right? Turns out a tree fell over and took out the main power line. It took them 3 days to repair it. No electricity meant no heat, lights, hot water, refrigeration (I ended up putting most of the food in a basket and putting that outside), or computers. What ended up saving me was an antique wood stove. I chopped up some spare wood 2x4s left over from redoing the fencing, and burned those. For 3 days that was my only way to heat the house, warm water, and cook meals. I had candles, but fortunately my supply if AA batteries for my flashlights held.
I ended up moving soon after, but a generator was next on my shopping list if I hadn't. I moved back to Southern California with a much better appreciation of what it's going to be like when The Big One hits. I ended up buying a diesel truck with 110V AC outlets, and keep spare cans of diesel fuel in the garage (it can last for years with additives to kill biological organisms, unlike gasoline which usually goes bad after a few months). Been mulling over getting solar panels plus a battery bank installed as well; I'm just not sure if this is the house I want to continue living at.
Ideally, backups should be stored offline (precisely to prevent ransomware from encrypting it) and off-site (in case the building burns down). Backing up your files to an always-accessible hard drive on a nearby system isn't much better than copying them to a second hard drive on the same computer.
MICROS~1 Windows strikes again ..
Was that the typewriters had just been retired to said closets last week.
God forbid anyone [in or working for government] design anything efficiently involving forethought.
But governments are SUPPOSED to be inefficient and ineffective.
That's because, whenever they DO get efficient, then then efficiently oppress everyone within their power an become tyrannies.
Inefficiency is a defence against this. It was even deliberately designed into the US Federal government in an effort to keep it from ballooning out of control.
Fortunately for us all, the incentive structures inherent in a coercive monopoly tend to make governments inefficient and error prone even without having such flakiness as a deliberate design element. (Doubly so, since such deliberate designs are themselves subject to the inherent flakiness, and it all goes fractal from there.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What are the costs to rewrite the water-billing software, payroll software, work order system, etc, and then integrate them all together?
That depends. Will they run under Wine? If so, you don't need to re-write them (or can rewrite them piecemeal as they need upgrading anyhow.)
Downside to Wine is that it emulates Windows so well that it makes the system vulnerable to some Windows malware attacks. B-b
But far from all, and you can sandbox it without too much work. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...what it's like for a typical it shop with a dumb user population...the issue is not windows per se, it's stupid users...
nothing to see here - move along