One cybersecurity expert said the outbreak - thought to have exploited a two-year-old vulnerability in VMWare Inc software - was typical of automated attacks on servers and databases that have been carried out by hackers for years. Ransomwhere said the cybercriminals appear to have extorted only $88,000, a modest haul by the standard of multimillion-dollar ransoms regularly demanded by some hacking gangs. They did not respond to additional questions. Reuters also contacted the hackers via an account advertised on their ransom notes but only received a payment demand in return. A dozen universities contacted by Reuters, including the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Rice University in Houston and institutions of higher learning in Hungary and Slovakia, did not immediately return messages seeking comment. "Florida Supreme Court's network and data are secure," he said, adding that the rest of the state court system's integrity also was not affected. Florida Supreme Court spokesman Paul Flemming told Reuters that the affected infrastructure had been used to administer other elements of the Florida state court system, and that it was segregated from the Supreme Court's main network. The extent of the disruption to the affected organizations, if any, was not clear. Ransomwhere did not name individual victims, but Reuters was able to identify some by looking up internet protocol address data tied to the affected servers via widely used internet scanning tools such as Shodan. Although this particular extortion campaign was not sophisticated, it drew warnings from national cyber watchdogs in part because of the speed of its spread. Ransomware is among the internet's most potent scourges. Those organizations are among more than 3,800 victims of a fast-spreading digital extortion campaign that locked up thousands of servers in Europe over the weekend, according to figures tallied by Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced platform that tracks digital extortion attempts and online ransom payments and whose figures are drawn from internet scans. Such as access to so-called free, recently released commercial movies that you know darn well aren't free.Reuters | Updated: 08-02-2023 03:35 IST | Created: 08-02-2023 03:35 ISTĪ global ransomware outbreak has scrambled servers belonging to Florida's Supreme Court and several universities in the United States and Central Europe, according to a Reuters analysis of ransom notes posted online to stricken servers. The real answer is to always get your software from trusted, legal sources, and stay away from sites offering other illegally obtained items for "free". There are lots of image editors to choose from, including the free, open source GIMP, which rivals much of what Photoshop can do. If you can't afford it, look for lower priced or free alternatives. If you need software that costs something, buy it. If you routinely download and install illegal software from P2P, file sharing or pirate sites, then you have no chance no matter how much anti-this-or-that you have on your Mac. It all depends on your computing habits, and using your head. It may now.īasically, you're giving up system resources the entire time your Mac is on to an app that may never have anything to do. The recent (badly written) ransomware that hit (very few) users wasn't stopped by RansomWhere. As with any anti-malware app, it can only stop what it knows about.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |