South Africa's state-owned power company, Eskom Holdings, has become the latest victim of the crippling ransomware attacks that have roiled governments around the world. Eskom Holdings Confirms Ransomware Attack According to the Johannesburg city government's official Twitter account, the division supplying electricity to the country's economic capital has had its systems encrypted and held...
Ransomware, which recently totally disrupted the government in Baltimore, has now overtaken a court system in Georgia . Ransomware Making A Comeback? After receiving a ransom note, officials in Georgia decided to take a system offline to be safe. Bruce Shaw, an official with the state court system, said: "Our systems have been compromised, so we have quarantined our servers and shut off our...
By CCN: Most of the Baltimore City’s government systems have been locked down since May 7th as a result of the “Robbinhood” ransomware attack. The successful crypto locking has forced the city to go “manual” in most aspects of its daily business and has affected several areas of life. For example, people are unable to buy and sell real estate within the city right now because the records cannot...
By CCN: In the two years leading up to 2018, a spate of ransomware attacks were analyzed in a report by a team of researchers hailing mostly from leading U.S. universities and Google. Results showed a conservative estimate of total funds stolen to be $16 million, with bitcoin providing a way for malicious actors to take payment from anywhere in the world. The first quarter of 2019 has perhaps...
According to the Ukranian cyber police, an unnamed man infected a bunch of his websites with Wannacry-like malware. Police Search Reveals Intentional Infection An unreliable Google translation makes it sound as if the man’s home had been invaded and police were investigating when they discovered his activities. Google’s translation reads: While conducting searches in the apartment of an intruder...
Netherlands seems to be the place to operate elaborate Bitcoin ransom schemes from. A man who extorted over $150,000 from several online services by DdoSing them and submitting a ransom request pleaded guilty last month and admitted wrongdoing. Two men behind the viral WannaCry Ransomware spree in 2017 also faced no jail time. Time Served A minor during the attacks, which started in 2016 and...
By CCN.com: China's sprawling bitcoin mining industry is being targeted by a terrifying new ransomware strain that is threatening the economy of the Sichuan river basin where most mining farms are located, housing a huge percentage of the bitcoin blockchain's hashpower. First detected in August 2018, the ransomware which is called "hAnt" has been observed to target a wide variety of mining rigs...
An organization representing indigenous tribes in Canada recently paid a ransom in bitcoin worth thousands of dollars in order to regain access to computer files that had been encrypted by a hacker. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), over C$20,000 worth of bitcoin was paid out by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) to an anonymous hacker who had breached...