Spartanburg County Public Library was hit by a ransomware cyberattack on Monday this week and so the users of the library were not in a position to check out or return books from that day onwards. The library staff has issued a notice on Tuesday saying the computer systems were down for maintenance and so users cannot access the online catalog and the wireless till the maintenance schedule is over.
However, the staff of the Spartanburg Public Library issued a press statement early today saying that the systems were down due to a ransomware attack and they had no idea when the services will return to normalcy.
Currently, the library technicians are working on the problem and are busy accessing the damage. County Librarian Todd Stephens said that he has notified the library board of Trustees and Spartanburg County Administration about the issue and is yet to contact the law enforcement.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders said that the incident was discovered at 11:00 am on Monday and the attacker is said to be demanding a payment of 3.8 bitcoins or $36,000 in return to the decryption. Its said that data related to 740,000 physical and online digital items is said to be secured in the Library’s database.
Note- The library doesn’t keep sensitive info of users in its database which includes social security numbers, credit cards or driving license numbers. So, Stephens has requested all users of the County Public Library to stop believing in rumors spread by a certain section of media and some users on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
And coming to the other news related to the ransomware world, a new variant called GandCrab ransomware is said to be on the prowl in the cyber world from last week. And is said that the malware is being distributed through a malvertising campaign called Seamless that then pushes visitors to the RIG exploit kit.
Once the rootkits find vulnerabilities on the visitor’s software, it then installs GandCrab ransomware which doesn’t have a decryption key in practical. But the GandCrab ransomware authors are found demanding a ransom in DASH currency as a payment to return the decryption key.
Researchers from Kaspersky Lab suggest that the best way to protect the systems from any ransomware variant is to have reliable backups which can be triggered on-time for data continuity.
The other advice from the Russia based company is to use anti-malware solutions for scanning attachments sent via emails. Also, Kaspersky is asking all computer users to keep their computer security programs updated with the latest security updates. At the same time keeping Java, Flash and Adobe Readers updated with the latest software makes complete sense in these situations.
