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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The City of New Bedford, in Massachusetts, has found a way to deal with ransomware without paying: shoring up defenses, restoring from backups, and rebuilding systems.
The attack on the American city's systems was identified on July 5, after employees noticed unusual network activity upon returning from the July 4th holiday, Mayor Jon Mitchell explained in a press conference on Wednesday.
"We haven't seen any interruption in municipal services at all," said Mitchell.
The city's Management Information Systems (MIS) staff identified the presence of the file-scrambling RYUK nasty, a sophisticated form of ransomware, and through prompt action managed to limit its impact.
Supposedly named for a character in the manga series Death Note, RYUK can find and encrypt network drives, and delete volume snapshots to prevent the use of Windows System Restore in the absence of external backups.
[...] Mitchell attributes the relatively minor impact of the infection to luck, skill and the city's IT architecture.
The luck element has to do with the fact that the malware intrusion began over the July 4th holiday. Holidays and weekends are apparently a common time to launch ransomware attacks because IT staff tends to be scarce and less vigilant then; but in this case the holiday also ensured that many of the city's desktop PCs were powered down, which limited the ransomware's ability to spread.
The prompt action of the MIS staff on the morning of July 5th to defensively disconnect systems, according to Mitchell, helped reduce the impact of the infection.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:34PM (6 children)
The problem with IT staff is they hire anyone just smart enough to find the Win key.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:56PM (5 children)
If someone's IT staff has that sort of problem, then the fault lies squarely with HR's hiring practices. Unfortunately, the modern hiring system is badly broken and corrupt. It favors people who are dishonest, usually specifically rigged to provide a fake excuse to outsource to drooling sacks of crap in India.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:27AM (4 children)
The real problem with IT in real organizations is that they dont let anybody do anyfuckingthing, not even right-click. I remember downloading a no-install version of fritzing to draw schematics because at the time they were too Jewish to buy me a license of visio or cad and banned outright all open source software. So when I told IT "don't worry, I downloaded and ran it myself without your approval," they literally freaked the fuck out like ,"OH MY GOD! HOW THE FUCK DID YOU HACK OUR SYSTM?!" Got put on IT's shit-list real soon. I guess IT people are idiots, mostly, after all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @03:08AM
IT came to our corporate retail store because their POS POS was down, again. The IT dude started yelling "who the fuck used paper tape to splice the LAN wires?". He's the only fucktard that has ever touched the rats nest of bullshit stuffed haphazardly behind the computer. Everything was thrown behind the computer in a non-ventilated cabinet. UPS, 14.4 external modem, port switch, VT(?) switch, and the clusterfuck of wires from 4 POS terminals. (This was early 1990s before internet)
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday September 08 2019, @03:45AM (2 children)
I guess IT people are idiots, mostly, after all.
You and most people are living with at least one foot in the past. Worse, your heads are lost there. There are no IT departments any more, at least not as you wish to remember them. While the groups you complain about may call themselves IT or claim to support the businesses they are embedded in, and may even be on company payroll, they are just plain old M$ resellers.
It has been decades since actual IT departments existed where they actually worked with, not against, the other employees to facilitate their tasks or find a way to use the computer and its programs as a force multiplier. That's on purpose. By working against the real employees the resellers help the MBAs put whole institutions into crisis so that the staff merely react to the latest stimulus and are thus very easily controled, manipulated, and certainly don't allow time to plan their way out of the mess. Wheras the latter is a force multiplier which helps society advance, something which we are no longer doing. People looking ahead become so busy fighting and working around IT that they miss that IT is working fully on behalf of M$. Others just become so overloaded with the impositions from the M$ resellers that they don't have time for anything outside of a panicked crisis mode. Think The Sirens of Titan or Harrison Bergeron instead of a bicycle for the mind [youtube.com].
You see it here with the ransomware. Rather than planning ahead and deploying something robust, their attempt at an answer is to bleat about buying "the latest version" from M$. Even if they stayed with M$ toys on the desktop, the infrastructure could be something sound like GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. One of the more important parts would be to be running OpenZFS underneath for the file sharing and have no local storage. Since OpenZFS design has snapshotting built in as a side effect, even if the M$ toys then brought home an infection of ransomware, it would be just a matter of rolling back to the state of the system as of minutes prior to the infection. Better still would be to ban M$ products across the board.
Now that many businesses and governments have outsourced these resellers, they get more malware. Why? Because the resellers charge by the hour to clean the machines they themselves left vulnerable by installing M$ Windows in the first place.
M$ admins are cheap, I hear MBAs bleat. They are not, if you add in the full costs. In the Total Cost of Ownership, two factors must be included. One is the cost of migration away, or the exit cost. Including exit costs is now required in the EU for their calculations. The other cost, which is more immediately relevant, is the full cost of malware. Now that malware also includes Windows ransomware, this issue needs to be brought up again.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:01PM (1 child)
Don't forget the weird, blind, dogmatic devotion to market forces. Free is suspect. "You get what you pay for", and that's the logic they use to justify buying Windows and other commercial software, and having to track licenses. Another thing they think is that Windows is backed by a large commercial organization, while Linux is just a hobbyists' project. Even the fact that IBM is on board with Linux isn't enough to penetrate their minds.
The US military has another screwy argument to justify buying and deploying Windows. Windows is made by an American company. Linux is made by foreigners. Therefore Windows is more trustworthy. Doesn't matter how much outsourcing to India or elsewhere MS did, or that Windows is not open source.
Working it from the other end, pointing out with details the numerous times MS has screwed their users, often fails to sway them. Can't even get an audience so you can make these arguments. MS has screwed up, many times, but never bad enough for long enough to alienate their devoted base. One MS move that does anger and alienate, is siccing the BSA on them. But MS figured out that was going too far (and they lost some court cases over the matter), and has backed away. Been a while since I heard of a BSA raid.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday September 09 2019, @06:57AM
Well, if you put it that way, especially the part about ignoring facts over dogma [learnreligions.com], M$ is more of a cult [techrepublic.com] than a business and has been for a long time. There many times when they go out of their way to lose money in exchange for gaining, or just retaining, control either of market share or mind share. That's one of the bigger reasons why it is so hard to eliminate.
Some court will some day overturn non-disparagement clauses in contracts thus enabling some of the less indoctrinated microsofters to tell what they know about the cult from the inside, if it's not too late by then.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.