News broke yesterday that Mecklenburg county in the US state of North Carolina has been hit by a ransomware attack, leaving county official to process jail inmates by hand, and forced to turn away electronic tax payments. Andy Norton, Director of Threat Intelligence at Lastline commented below.
Andy Norton, Director of Threat Intelligence at Lastline:
“Mecklenburg county has been dramatically effected by this Lockcrypt ransomware attack, despite Mecklenburg county having confidence in its backup procedures being able to restore systems. It highlights the costs in losses of operational capability to the county, in terms of closed services,and time to restore effected systems. The initial compromise was due to an employee being socially engineered to open a email attachment, however, roughly 10% of Mecklenburg County servers have been effected, suggesting that LockCrypt was able to spread through the environment. This is a classic example of real world security: Being under funded, under resourced, under protected and under pressure. We need a systemic change to way security is being done outside of the top global organisations.”
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