1.) Servers at the West Haven have been down since Tuesday this week due to a cyber attack and reports are now in that the IT staff of the Connecticut based county has paid $2000 in bitcoins to the hackers in order to decrypt their data from ransomware.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the malware attack resulted in the disruption of 23 on-site servers and one back up server. Although the malware was contained by 5:30 PM on Wednesday, the damage is reported to have been done by then as all the city hall computers had to be shut down as the servers failed to normally boot up.
West Haven Mayor Nancy Rossi confirmed the news that her county’s utility services were down due to a cyber attack but failed to fully acknowledge that her County region’s IT staff bowed down to the demands of the hackers by paying them the said ransom in Cryptocurrency.
2.) In other news related to Ransomware, City of Muscatine a county region located in Iowa released a press statement yesterday that several of the city servers were hit with a ransomware.
The statement adds that the cyber attack took place at 1 am on October 10 disrupting a MUSCOM server, the city of Muscatine Shieldware, Springbrook Financial server and other city servers. The IT staff of the city of Muscatine is working hard to isolate the ransomware spread and is doing their best to restore the servers. Muscatine police and the related law enforcement agencies have been notified about the incident late yesterday.
3.) The Indiana National Guard has issued a public statement yesterday which says that a server used for nonmilitary purposes, but having information related to a large section of civilians and military personnel were attacked by ransomware.
A spokesperson from the Indiana National Guard and speaking on behalf of Indiana State Police has denied the news reports which say that the attack was launched by a state-funded actor. But she said that all the personnel affected by the malware will be notified about the incident and a third party security company will be asked to monitor anything suspicious or fraudulent on this issue for the next 6 months.
4.) Madison County servers were down due to a ransomware cyber attack since October 7th,2018 and the staff of the county say that they were unable to access the email server since then.
Brent Mendenhall, the County Commissioner confirmed the news and stated that the IT staff were investigating the incident and were trying to find out the source from where the ransomware virus was sent.
It’s said that the cyber attack has affected the digital files mainly related to the County’s financial department. And so it might affect the payroll cheque distribution for this month and next month.
