Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
My understanding is that all systems, including backups, were under the same domain controllers. The domain controllers were compromised and all reachable systems (including current backups) were encrypted. The year old backup sounds like someone found an old tape backup archive.