Louisiana declares state of emergency in response to ransomware attack

[Karlston]

somebody clicked the shiny link again —

Louisiana declares state of emergency in response to ransomware attack

Louisiana's Cybersecurity Commission activates its emergency powers in response.

Enlarge / To the credit of the three school districts affected, at least nobody's trying to pay the Danegeld.

US Air Force / Adam Butterick

This Wednesday, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency in response to ransomware attacks on three public school districts.

 

There's no word so far on which ransomware variant has hit the school districts or what the exact extent of damages is. Eddie Jones, principal of Florien High School (a school in one of the three affected districts), told KSLA News that his technology supervisor received an alert on his phone at 4am Sunday about unusually high bandwidth usage. Shortly afterward, investigators discovered ransomware on the school servers. Jones says "anything and everything housed solely on the School District's servers" was lost, including 17 years of his own personal documents.

 

The Sabine and Morehouse district ransomware attacks this week follow an attack on the Monroe City school district last week. Morehouse parish claims not to have been affected to the extent of the other two parishes, and it states that "all major systems, including payroll, are operational."

 

The three school districts have all made statements to the effect that they do not believe sensitive or private information was compromised, or that any "unauthorized access" occurred. This seems to be an overly confident statement, given Jones' statement that his district's first awareness of the problem stemmed from unusually high bandwidth usage. Still, there's no way to know for certain until the statewide effort to address the attacks and look for traces of their authors concludes and more concrete information is disseminated.

 

Louisiana's declaration of a state of emergency follows a model established by colourado in the wake of a ransomware attack there in March 2018. In colourado, the declaration of emergency only came after a week the colourado Office of Information Technology's overwhelmed and short-staffed IT department spent trying to disinfect more than 2,000 infected machines. Declaring a state of emergency allows the National Guard's resources and personnel to be brought in.

 

Edwards' emergency declaration also freezes the prices of services and goods in the designated emergency area to those "ordinarily charged... in the same market area at or immediately before the state of emergency." This is likely a pre-emptive measure to prevent local IT consulting services the schools may contract from hiking their rates while the schools are desperate.

 

This declaration is the first activation of the emergency support functions of Louisiana's Cybersecurity Commission, which was first established by Governor Edwards in 2017. Edwards declared then that Louisiana is "an international leader in regards to cybersecurity capabilities." How well the state responds to these attacks—including discovering the actors behind them, and establishing and truthfully disclosing the actual nature and extent of data both lost and exfiltrated during them—will do much toward outlining the veracity of that statement.

 

 

 

Source: Louisiana declares state of emergency in response to ransomware attack (Ars Technica)

[straycat19]

Indiana had two city  governments attacked by ransomware this week, LaPorte and Terre Haute.  I mention this because these are the first attacks that I have information on where the attacks were intercepted and stopped before they could do much damage.  No ransoms were paid, and all the data was recovered.  

[funkyy]

These wannabe "cyber terrorists" (I'm not talking about state originated attacks) do the internet community a great disservice because apart from the crime of extortion itself and the chaos and danger it causes, it also gives fuel to those who would like to impose total government control and business monopoly over we internet users who do not set out to cause any disruption. I for one hope these idiots get identified, caught and punished severely.😒😒😒

[steven36]

2 hours ago, funkyy said:

These wannabe "cyber terrorists" (I'm not talking about state originated attacks) do the internet community a great disservice because apart from the crime of extortion itself and the chaos and danger it causes, it also gives fuel to those who would like to impose total government control and business monopoly over we internet users who do not set out to cause any disruption. I for one hope these idiots get identified, caught and punished severely.😒😒😒

Most people who make malware become security  researchers  , some even went  to prison for it and get out and get a good job because of there hacking skills. Also many became Govt contractors (State hackers) in Russia and the USA to avoid jail time. It's called filliping them . Also many Antivirus devs use to make there own  Viruses  .

 

Yu Bing almost got the death sentence  for doing it in China back in 2010.

 

Another software engineer told the First Financial Daily that in the 1990’s many antivirus companies adopted the strategy of creating viruses and then killing them. The phenomenon was somewhat restrained after 2000, he said.

 

Liu Xu, former president of Rising Antivirus, and president and founder of Eastern Micropoint, said in a public statement at the end of 2008 that there are many gray areas for antivirus companies to make and spread viruses; many types of malware have been developed by otherwise legitimate companies, while other products hover in a gray area between virus and normal software.

 

 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-antivirus-companies-create-viruses-they-kill_1505228.html

 

But if you do it for a government  you will be rewarded for  it and get wealthy .

 

Symantec shut down PC tools after they got sued for making Scare-ware in 2012 they made well known products  that gave false positives  as trail versions  to scare you into buying it.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/113303-symantec-accused-of-malware-scare-tactics-to-sell-its-security-software

 

Also they sold registry mechanic

Registry Cleaners: Digital Snake Oil

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2015/06/digital-snake-oil/

 

Registry Cleaners not been of any value since Windows 95 when Microsoft invented them and removed them in Windows 98 , They removed needed entrees from the reg in  Windows that botch your PC . I didn't know this tell  after i got out of uploading   warez so i use to push this snake oil  and test it and mess up my Windows install .

 

They lots of Snake Oil software on Windows that we shouldn't use and people who use warez swear it's great, just because it gets cracked they use it .  Others AV vendors make system optimizer  snake oil too.

 

IObit stole Malwarebytes signatures back 2009 also they made lots of snake oil apps you don't need.

https://www.cnet.com/news/malwarebytes-accuses-rival-of-software-theft/

 

Kaspersky made fake malware to mess up other companies even

 

Exclusive: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals - Ex-employees

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kaspersky-rivals/exclusive-russian-antivirus-firm-faked-malware-to-harm-rivals-ex-employees-idUSKCN0QJ1CR20150814

 

So you can't trust the industry because there just as shady as black hat hackers ,  They profit off the fact you catch malware just like hackers do they don't want to stop malware . if they was none they would make some so they can keep making money off of it.

 

I use Linux i don't need there shitty products and i never cached no ransomware  only reason they catch it is because they idiots . It can be prevented by using conman sense . As long as there idiots dumb enough to fall for it they will always be ransomware . It should of  been called idotware .🤣
 

 

[jango]

@steven36

What linux distro you installed bro ?

[steven36]

1 hour ago, jango said:

@steven36

What linux distro you installed bro ?

 

Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 I been using it every since 17.10 in October 2017 everything been ruining smooth for 2 years now.  19.04 got Better graphics support with Mesa 19.0 . I just updated  Mesa myself  using  19.0.8 atm , so  they was no need for me to upgrade to that one . Anything is faster  than   standard Ubuntu with Gnome  but even it improved a lot with 19.04  there's were got the biggest upgrade was with Gnome was 19.04  next release they say it  will even be faster. but i never liked standard Ubuntu . I think it's ugly even when it was unity desktop witch is just a fork of Gnome.