First it was Florida, now Ontario is the victim of a ransomware attack
IT security audit specialists report a ransomware attack incident occurring in a municipality in eastern Ontario, Canada, in late June. The little city management reported that their systems have just been completely restored.
The Nation municipality’s computer systems were
infected with a variant of encryption malware sometime on Sunday, June 30,
public officials noted. Threat actors have illegitimately accessed government
networks, infecting any system in its wake with ransomware. The ransomware
managed to encrypt multiple systems, disrupting some of the local government
services as well as its email server.
Francois St. Amour, mayor of The Nation, stated
that the attack has created countless inconveniences for his administration,
“employees can’t even send or receive emails,” he said. Days after
the incident some of the services began to be restored, with the exception of
the email server, “this will take longer because IT security audit experts
will have to reset each account individually”, the mayor added.
The mayor said that the incident was reported
to the police and the Ontario Information and Privacy Commission. Although the
investigation is not yet concluded, authorities do not believe that hackers
have accessed the data compromised during the incident: “The main
motivation of these people is not the data theft, they only care about blocking
access to the systems and their stored information to force victims to pay the
ransom”, a spokesman for the Information Commission said.
Sources close to The Nation’s government claim
that hackers demanded a payment of more than $10k USD via a Bitcoin transfer;
the municipality refused to comply with the attackers’ demands, carrying out
the recovery process on its own. The mayor added that new security policies
will soon be implemented to prevent future attacks.
Multiple ransomware attacks against local
government IT infrastructure have been reported recently. IT security audit
specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) reported
a wave of attacks on small towns in Florida,
USA, which paralyzed services in three locations for weeks. These incidents may
have some connection to each other.
(Visited 3 1 times)
Gloss