Ransomware Attack Knocks The Weather Channel Off the Air (wsj.com) 36
A computer attack knocked the Weather Channel off the air for more than an hour Thursday morning [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], and federal authorities are investigating the incident, WSJ is reporting. From the report: After its broadcast was disrupted, the weather news service sent a tweet saying it had been the victim of "a malicious software attack," adding that federal law-enforcement officials were investigating the matter. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the incident was a ransomware attack, and the agency was conducting an investigation. Ransomware is an increasingly common form of digital extortion. Criminals install it on computer networks via trickery or hacking, and the software then spreads from computer to computer, locking up systems until a digital ransom is paid.
Re:Ransomware attack - good excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
A successful ransomware attack IS someone in their IT screwed up. On the scale of excuses, it deflects almost zero blame.
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some folks in IT think they are safe because they 'know the score'... anyone can be phished, or hit with ransomware any time... it just takes the right carrot, as it were.
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You've never heard of WannaCry?
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A successful ransomware attack IS someone in their IT screwed up. On the scale of excuses, it deflects almost zero blame.
Yeah, I'd agree with that. It's not clear from the brief article whether this was a "successful" attack. Systems have vulnerabilities, mitigating them is part of the game; backups are part of that mitigation.
If the downtime began when the problem was noticed (either systems were taken down as a response measure, or things started crashing due to the infection), and it only took 1.5 hours to:
- Determine the nature and extent of the problem
- Either check backups for the most recent one without the infe
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A successful attack would be one that took the system down. On that, it's successful. I'm sure no ransom was paid - they did their thing correctly on that end if they were up on a redundant system in 1.5 hours. Does make you wonder what kind of a mess their redundant system was in that it takes 1.5 hours, though.
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And how often is the hacker even in a country with an extradition treaty with the US?
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Not that often because most of the time, they are already living in the US :/. At the end of the day, it is still possible to sue the offending nation technically via the WTO with regard to the exporting of naughty 'bits' ;).
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The punishment is more than severe enough. The odds of enforcement are what's lacking.
Sure did (Score:2)
I had a hard time getting an engineer to answer the phone yesterday due to the local on the 8's not showing up at all. When a harassed sounding guy finally answered he interrupted me to tell me that they were 'working on it and had no time frame on its restoration". We are a small setup and have started backing up daily with removable drives. We verify one daily a week and one weekly a month and leave them out of rotation for six months. If they get us we can rebuild it. Of course due to our small size
local on the 8's NBC / Comcast took the fun out of (Score:2)
local on the 8's NBC / Comcast took the fun out of that.
And killed weather scan.
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We still get local radar and local forecasts. Weather star is pretty decent integrated package.
App Too? (Score:2)
After killing off the great Intellicast.com (Score:2)
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