Multiple counties in various U.S. states are under a massive ransomware attack, reported the authors of the book ‘Learn ethical hacking‘. This time, counties of Orange, in California, and Genesee, Michigan, have been the victims of this attack campaign. A few days ago it was the turn of Albany, New York.
According to the reports, the entire Orange County computer network remained out of service since Monday, April 1st, after government officials detected a ransomware infection, disrupting the functions of public offices, like the Register of Deeds office, the sheriff’s office, and all the county library systems.
The authors of ‘Learn ethical hacking’ mentioned that the origin of the infection is still unknown; meanwhile, local government sources confirmed that the attack was detected on time, so the disruption of services is due more to a precautionary measure to stop the spread of ransomware.
For now, the Orange IT department has only published a statement that confirms that “an encryption virus has infected our systems. The recovery process continues, but there is still no estimated date for the total re-establishment of county systems”.
On the other hand, officials from Genesee County, Michigan, recently confirmed that local government systems were attacked with ransomware. According to a statement released this Tuesday, the malware took hostage to the files of the county and the attackers demanded a ransom for their release.
Genesee County decided not to negotiate with the threat actors, so its IT department began the process of isolating the infection and recovering the compromised systems. The local government also denounced the incident to the U.S. federal authorities.
This couple of incidents joins the recent cyber attack that crippled some of the systems of the Government of Albany, New York, mainly affecting the regular work of the local police force. The authors of ‘Learn ethical hacking’, and the specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security believe that these attack campaigns could cause millions of losses for the governments of the impacted cities.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
