Indiana-based Cancer Agency database has been hit by Ransomware and the malicious virus spreading criminals are demanding a payment of 50 BTC to unlock the files. As per our sources, the victim is Little Red Door which is a Cancer Services agency based in East Central Indiana.
Little Red Door helps victims in reducing their financial and emotional burdens involved in Cancer Diagnosis.
According to the statement sent to several news agencies, the organization was hit by ransomware on Wednesday, January 11th,2017 at 10:00 PM. And as per the prima facie available with the authorities, all critical data has been locked with the malicious virus.
On January 12th,2017, the cyber crooks contacted the Little Red Door staff on phone and via email and demand the ransom to be transferred in the form of 50 bitcoins to a Bitcoin Wallet.
As the President and Vice President of the Cancer agency failed to respond, the cyber crooks started harassing the family members of the cancer patients.
The agency then decided to raise their voice and contacted FBI on this note. The agency’s vice president has openly disclosed that his agency is in ‘no mood’ to pay the said $45,000 ransom.
FBI has initiated a special team of security professionals on this probe and has asked the agency staff to contact the victims and alert them of possible spam and phishing attacks.
The good news is that all the files which were locked by the criminals in the database were already available as a back-up on a cloud storage platform. So, the staff will have access to critical data from the cloud platform.
Note- Ransomware is a specialized malicious software which when induced into a database locks all files from being accessed. The only way to unlock the files is to pay a ransom to the malware spreading crooks and get the key to unlocking the files. B
But here in such situations, there is no guarantee that the cyber crooks will return the key as promised as soon as they receive the payment. And what if they demand more….?
