Ransomware Attack Pushes City of Oakland Into State of Emergency:
The city of Oakland, California issued a local state of emergency late Tuesday as a result of the ongoing impact following a ransomware attack that first hit city IT systems on Wednesday, February 8.
According to an update, the city "continues to experience a network outage that has left several non-emergency systems including phone lines within the City of Oakland impacted or offline."
City officials say the declaration of a local state of emergency (PDF) allows Oakland to expedite the procurement of equipment and materials, activate emergency workers if needed, and issue orders on an expedited basis to help restore systems and bring services back online.
While voicemail and other non-emergency services were disrupted or taken offline, no critical or emergency services such as 911 and fire departments have been impacted.
[...] While some cities paid the ransom – including Florence City, Lake City, and Riviera Beach City – others chose not to pay, in some cases with disastrous results. The City of Atlanta, which refused to pay a $51,000 ransom, spent millions to recover the impacted systems.
[...] Cybercriminals earned significantly less from ransomware attacks in 2022 compared to 2021 as victims are increasingly refusing to pay ransom demands.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 17, @10:39PM (2 children)
>victims are increasingly refusing to pay ransom demands.
Maybe they've finally learned how to automate and protect their backup systems?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 19, @03:02PM (1 child)
Yeah, and learned to value IT and computer security experts more? Curb some of that fear that the only good hacker is an imprisoned hacker? And stop whining that upgrading from some ancient version of Windows is too expensive, while continuing to ignore the existence of Linux?
I don't know the details of any of these particular hacks, but in every case, it turns out that computer security measures work, you just have to use them, and use them right, which isn't that hard.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 19, @03:18PM
>value IT and computer security experts more?
I can imagine that a lot of rather large operations grew organically from pre computer days to where they are now with little if any formal education of the IT workforce. Not that formal education is the be all end all, but it does help raise the floor level of awareness of better practices at least.
GTE-Verizon Tampa took an old injured pole climber and put him in charge of maintaining the digital switches with little (if any) formal training, mostly what he taught himself by making rip-copies of Netflix DVDs on his home PC... One day a failed upgrade of the switch configuration left 1-800 service to most of Florida unavailable for the 90 minutes it took them to notice the failure plus 6 hours beyond that it took for them to scramble and roll back the change.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end