Ransomware attacks seem to surge day by day on the servers belonging to government agencies and the latest to fall as the victim is the computer network of the US Marshals Service, aka USMS. According to the update provided by the Department of Justice, the incident occurred on February 17th of this year and sensitive details such as PII of employees, administrative data, returns from legal procedures, third party documents and some information related to private detectives was accessed and possibly stolen by hackers.
Unidentified people familiar with the matter state that a single database was infected by the file encrypting malware and has been isolated from the USMS network.
Information is out that the hackers couldn’t compromise the server containing the Witness Security Files Information System database and so the possibility of impact on the threat scale might be low.
If history is considered, a similar incident targeted the servers of the US Marshalls Service in mid 2020, exposing data related to 387,000 inmates and former criminals who were released after completing their jail term. Names, criminals accessed their Date of Births, home addresses, social security numbers and, later found to be operating from Vietnam.
FBI launched an investigation on this issue and discovered that the criminals infiltrated the database after hacking a public server of USMS that keeps a log of housing and movement of prisoners.
Remediation efforts are being undertaken as the federal agency wants to mitigate the associated risks swiftly.
NOTE- United States Marshals Service is a federal law agency that operates under the directions of Attorney General and acts as an enforcement arm to the United States Federal Court to ensure a smooth flow of judiciary operations and constitutional rights.
