1.) Olympia Financial Group of Canada has claimed that its IT Infrastructure has been encrypted by ransomware and the hackers are demanding a huge amount of ransom in cryptocurrency to decrypt the data.
The IT department of Olympia says that the attack took place on Feb 2nd this year and the ransomware variant is under investigation. Currently, there is no evidence that the encrypted data has been compromised or being circulated on the web. The Calgary based company says that the company might take a bit of time to bring back the operations to normalcy.
Cybersecurity Measures to curb such attacks in the future have been taken and impacted clients will be notified via email shortly. RCMP Cybercrime Division was informed about the incident on February 3rd this year.
2.) Coming to another news related to Ransomware attack, an Optometry office named Dr. Thomas Deluca and Dr. Anthony Marciano & associates based in Prospect, Connecticut, US made an official announcement last week that a ransomware attack hit its database in November 2018 which locked down the computers from access until a ransom was paid.
It’s revealed that the personal info of more than 26K patients was compromised by the attackers when the IT head of the healthcare office refused to bow down to the demands of hackers i.e to pay a $4,000 ransom in exchange of a decryption key.
An official statement was also posted on the website on January 25th,2019 on this note where the officials declared that they aren’t aware of the intensity and misuse of the compromised data as a result of the cyber incident.
Out of caution, the eye care service offering hospital said that it is sending notification letters to the impacted individuals and will offer resources to assist them on a further note.
3.) In other news related to cyber attacks, UK based Student Loans Company(SLC) said that its IT department has succeeded in thwarting more than one million cyber attacks in the last financial year and that includes crypto jacking malware attack which turned successful to a certain extent.
As per the Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by the Parliament Street Think Tank, SLC, known to grant loans and grants to Universities and colleges is reported to have suffered an attempted 964,000 cyber attacks in 2017-18.
Highly placed source from SLC UK said that the official website of the government agency was also infected by Monero Cryptocurrency mining malware via a 3rd party plugin in March’18. Since no customer data was hosted on the server, no data was compromised in the incident.
