Florida court system, US and EU universities hit by ransomware | – #Florida #court #system #universities #hit #ransomware
LONDON/WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – The global ransomware epidemic is Florida Ali Court and USA and hacked servers belonging to a number of universities in Central Europe.
The organizations are among more than 3,800 victims of a fast-spreading digital extortion campaign that shut down thousands of servers in Europe over the weekend, according to estimates by Ransomwhere, a platform that tracks and numbers digital extortion attempts and online ransom payments. taken from internet scans.
Ransomware is one of the most powerful scourges of the internet. Although this particular extortion campaign was not sophisticated, due to the speed with which it spread national received warnings from cyber watchers.
Ransomwhere did not name individual victims, but Reuters was able to identify some by looking for internet protocol address data associated with affected servers through widely used internet scanning tools such as Shodan.
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The extent, if any, of the disruption to affected organizations was unclear.
Florida Ali Court spokesman Paul Flemming told Reuters that the affected infrastructure is Florida court used to control other elements of the system and it Ali Disconnected from the main network of the court.
“The network and data of the Florida Supreme Court are secure,” he said, adding that the state court the rest of the system’s integrity is not affected.
Dozens of universities contacted by Reuters included the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Rice University in Houston and universities in Hungary and Slovakia. education The businesses did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Reuters also contacted the hackers through the account advertised in their ransom notes, but received only a payment request in return. They did not answer further questions.
Ransomwhere said that cybercriminals only 88,000 dollars have extorted money, a modest amount by the standards of the multi-million dollar ransoms routinely demanded by some hacker gangs.
The outbreak, which is believed to have exploited a two-year-old vulnerability in VMWare Inc ( VMW.N ) software, is typical of automated attacks on servers and databases that have been carried out by hackers for years, a cybersecurity expert said.
VMWare urged customers to upgrade to the latest versions of their software.
“It’s not unusual,” said Patrice Auffret, founder of French web scanning company Onyphe. “The difference is scale.”
The highly visible nature of the outbreak, which began earlier this month, is also unusual. Because the servers facing the Internet were affected, researchers and tracking services such as Ransomwhere or Onyphe could easily track down the criminals.
Digital security officials in Italy said on Monday there was no evidence to suggest “aggression by an entity such as the state or a hostile state”.
Finland National Cyber Security Center information security expert Samuli Kononen said the attack was carried out by a criminal gang, but he added that many victims were able to rescue their data without paying a ransom.
“More experienced ransomware teams usually don’t make this kind of mistake,” he said.
Reporting by James Pearson in London and Raphael Sutter in Washington; Edited by Anna Driver and Bill Berkrot
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
2023-02-08 14:51:50
Source – reuters
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