Crime Ransomware gangs get more aggressive against law enforcement

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RICHMOND, Va., (AP) — Police Chief Will Cunningham came to work four years ago to find that his six-officer department was the victim of a crime.

Hackers had taken advantage of a weak password to break in and encrypt the files of the department in Roxana, a small town in Illinois near St. Louis, and were demanding $6,000 of bitcoin.

“I was shocked, I was surprised, frustrated," Cunningham said.

Police departments big and small have been plagued for years by foreign hackers breaking into networks and causing varying level of mischief, from disabling email systems to more serious problems with 911 centers temporarily knocked offline. In some cases important case files have gone missing.

But things have taken a dark turn recently. Criminal hackers are increasingly using brazen methods to increase pressure on law enforcement agencies to pay ransoms, including leaking or threatening to leak highly sensitive and potentially life-threatening information.

The threat of ransomware has risen to a level that's impossible to ignore, with hardly a day going by without news of a hospital, private business or government agency being victimized. On Saturday, the operator of a major pipeline system that transports fuel across the East Coast said it had been victimized by a ransomware attack and had halted all pipeline operations to deal with the threat.

The increasingly defiant attacks on law enforcement agencies underscore how little ransomware gangs fear repercussions.

Read more about it here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ransomware-gangs-more-aggressive-against-114634064.html

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This is so real and they are doing it every day.
 
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jonas

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> In some cases important case files have gone missing.

I guess getting hacked is a fact of life with the current state of art in computing, but losing important data over it is just incompetence
 

jonas

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on point:

 

Ghan

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I guess getting hacked is a fact of life with the current state of art in computing, but losing important data over it is just incompetence

It's also possible that is due to insufficient funding for proper backups. But I certainly suspect there is a lot of incompetence in law enforcement as well. I mean, there's a lot of it in business at least....
 

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All my clients have hourly backups of all there systems so whenever they get ransomed, which does not happen all the time but does still happen we are able to recover them quickly. These are not huge businesses though and they have been setup to store everything on the network and not individual computers so the infrastructure is built to resists these kinds of attacks. They are a pain in the ass though and we will sometimes lose some data and the time it takes to restore.
 
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