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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.
Nice to see some people in this country aren't so dependent on high technology that they can still operate without it.
There's always one asshole that can't help but ruin a decent joke.
She never said that.
I've been there. No competent IT person in their right mind would move up there. It's considerably north enough from Anchorage (about 50 miles) that your commute would suck (if you want to live somewhere real), and the wrong mix of "rural" to appease the people who want to live in the middle of nowhere, and .. Palmer is a shithole anyway.
No worries man, more for me. No person in their right mind would move to Alaska for its beauty and freedom then shack up in some hole like Anchorage.... Palmer is a bit dumpy though, but its a really insignificant part of the borough let alone the state.
... 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.