Monroe College which is in New York City has reported yesterday that its servers were encrypted with ransomware who were demanding $2 million ransom to free up the database from the malware.
What’s interesting in this news piece is that the cyber incident came into light just after few weeks when reports came in that two cities in Florida were hit by file-encrypting malware who shelled out $600,000 and $400,000(appx) to free up the data from the clutches of the hackers.
Authorities from the Monroe College are showing the reluctance of saying whether they will pay the $2 million ransom as demanded by the cyber crooks to decrypt their database.
However, a source from the educational institute says that the developments from here on this incident will be kept as a secret from the media for reasons.
Jackie Ruegger, the spokesperson of the college says that the mitigation of the attack will be done in the safest way and added that all the data was backed up and so the infiltration can be taken lightly.
Meanwhile, the news is out that another public administration department of the fed has surrendered to the demands of hackers by paying a ransom of $130,000 to recover data on computer systems impacted by ransomware.
The digital assets of La Porte County were reported to be encrypted by a file encrypting ransomware on July 6th of this year and highly placed sources add that 2 domain controllers were impacted by the incident leading to severe disruption.
Email services and the website host have been suspended since the county did not have a disaster recovery plan it chose to bow down to the demands of the hacker by paying a sum of $130,000 in Bitcoin, out of which $100,000 was covered by the insurance.
Prima facie has detected that the malware which encrypted the database of the La Porte county services was Ryuk Ransomware for which the anti-ransomware solution offering companies project only 3% to 5% success to decrypt files.
Strange….but true!
