Ransomware - Page 2

CNA Financial, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, reportedly paid $40 million to hackers that hijacked their systems in a ransomware attack that occurred in late March.

According to a recent report, the hackers behind the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which caused a gas shortage along the East Coast, received $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments from 47 victims over the past nine months.

The Irish Health Service Executive system has been hit by a ransomware attack, shutting down all IT systems just days after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in the U.S.

A recent report from Wired reveals that a week after a ransomware attack shut down Colonial Pipeline halting fuel distribution on the East Coast, the company paid a reported $5 million dollar ransom to regain control of their systems and resume operations. The payoff may lead to future ransomware attacks, as one expert notes: “Unfortunately, it’ll help keep United States critical infrastructure providers in the crosshairs. If a sector proves to be profitable, they’ll keep on hitting it.”

Colonial Pipeline Co. paid hackers nearly $5 million to free their computer network Friday, despite claims they had no intention of doing so.

GasBuddy, an app that helps users to find the best availability and prices on fuel, has topped Apple’s App Store this week amidst the gas shortage caused by the recent ransomware cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline. The app has proved so popular that its servers have experienced outages this week.

Morgan Wright, the Chief Security Advisor at SentinelOne and former Senior Advisor of the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, appeared on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow on Wednesday to discuss the recent rise in ransomware attacks. According to Wright, “if you remove the ability to monetize this, these gangs are out of business because they’re only in it for one reason — to make money.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is providing relief to those in the state filling up their gas tanks after a cyberattack crippled one of the largest gas pipelines in the U.S.

Ransomware hackers have reportedly breached the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s computer network in a targeted cyberattack and are threatening to release sensitive data including lists of police informants if the ransom is not paid.

Tech giant Apple has reportedly been targeted in a $50 million ransomware attack following the theft of a collection of engineering and manufacturing schematics of current and future products.

Hackers who wanted $40 million in ransom from a Florida school district that refused to hand over the money recently published almost 26,000 stolen files.

Throughout 2020 the world saw multiple major hacks and breaches of schools, governments, and private companies as more systems moved online and the world adapted to the coronavirus pandemic — here are five of the most notable hacks and breaches of 2020.

The Information Technology Organization (ITO) of Iran claimed on Thursday that it detected two major cyberattacks this week.

Confidential personal data was compromised by hackers that targeted the Clark County School District in Clark County, Nevada, last week. A cybersecurity firm claims that the hackers publicly released all of the documents they gained access to after the district refused to pay the ransom. The compromised data includes the social security numbers of district employees.

International law enforcement organization Interpol published a report Tuesday that found an “alarming rate of cyberattacks” occurring during the coronavirus pandemic, with hackers shifting their focus from individuals and small businesses to major corporate and government systems.

The University of California, San Francisco has admitted that it paid $1.14 million to “ransomware” hackers to retrieve research that hackers had temporarily compromised. The hackers initially demanded a payment of $3 million to return the data that they had stolen from the university.

New Orleans city computer went offline on Sunday after suffering a cyberattack. City employees were instructed to shut down their computers to prevent further data breaches as IT security personnel worked to regain control of the system. The city has reportedly declared a state of emergency over the matter.

The Alabama-based DCH Health System has reportedly paid off hackers that took three local hospitals computer systems hostage using ransomware. One cybersecurity expert called such payouts “the fuel that drive ransomware attacks.”

Ten hospitals across the United States and Australia were victims of ransomware attacks that hijacked computer systems, forcing some of the hospitals to turn away all but the most critical patients.

The city of Riviera Beach, Florida, agreed this week to pay $600,000 ransom in Bitcoin to a gang of hackers that encrypted its data, having concluded efforts to fight the data theft would be even more expensive and possibly futile.

The Baltimore City government computer system fell victim to a ransomware attack this week, marking the second time this has happened in just over a year.

A cyberattack at a Los Angeles newspaper printing plant halted the delivery of a number of popular newspapers, Saturday, including the Los Angeles Times, and west coast editions of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

U.S. federal authorities have indicted two Iranian nationals for deploying “sophisticated ransomware” from inside the Islamic Republic to extort hundreds of victims including hospitals, municipalities, and public institutions, a move that has caused over $30 million in losses, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday.

The Justice Department has charged a computer programmer working on behalf of the North Korean government with the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014, along with the massive WannaCry ransomware attack last year and an $81 million theft from a bank in Bangladesh.

Intelligence analysts have discovered a new strand of North Korean malware that could be used in a cyber attack against the United States.

911 call centers are becoming increasingly vulnerable to hackers, who shut down the centers’ systems before demanding a ransom, according to a report.

The Boeing corporation admitted on Wednesday that a “small number of systems” were affected by a “limited intrusion of malware,” but denounced what it called “overstated and inaccurate” reports that the malware attack was much larger.

The latest outbreak of ransomware has renewed discussions of invoking NATO Article 5 in response to cyberattacks – the article that calls for mutual defense against a military attack.

A massive new ransomware attack similar to the devastating WannaCry virus is hitting corporate and government targets across Europe and Russia, from the A.P. Moller-Maersk shipping line to Russia’s Rosneft oil company.

Microsoft withheld a free patch from old software users that “could have slowed the devastating spread of ransomware WannaCry to businesses,” opting to charge those using older machines instead, according to a report.

The “Shadow Brokers,” the group that pilfered and published the stolen National Security Agency hacking tools that turned the WannaCry ransomware virus into a global crisis, are threatening to sell more stolen cyber weapons in June.

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about what Gaffney called “the persistent and seemingly escalating difficulties that the president is having inside his own White House.”

On Monday, a Google security researcher announced the discovery of code in the “WannaCry” ransomware virus that suggests a notorious North Korean hacking group is behind the major cybercrime.

Amidst a heated debate on healthcare in the United States, White House Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert has stated Britain’s National Health Service was significantly affected by last week’s ransomware cyber attack due to the centralized nature of the health system.

Disney is refusing, thus far, to buckle to hackers’ ransomware demands to return the new edition of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

SnoopWall, Inc. CEO Gary Miliefsky joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the massive ransomware attack that swept the world over the weekend.