Hackers encrypt all college computers with ransomware: $2 million ransom

Officials at Monroe College, a private university based in New York, recently reported a cybersecurity incident that affected its operations. According to system audit specialists, the hackers in charge of the attack compromised the academic institution’s computer systems, demanding a ransom of more than $2 million in exchange for restoring their systems.  

The university’s administrative staff mentioned
that the incident was already notified to the city authorities; “Many of
our systems have been affected by this cyberattack
and, for now, access has been prevented by hackers,” a statement from
Monroe College says.

For now, the university is turning to some
alternative methods, such as using pen and paper to maintain some of its activities
and services; “This University was founded in 1933, we know how to work
without technological resources at hand”, the statement adds.

System audit experts recently reported a chain
of ransomware
attacks against systems in some cities in Baltimore and Florida. According to
local media reports, an unidentified group of threat actors managed to infect
about 10K computers belonging to the Baltimore government using a ransomware
variant called “RobbinHood”. On that occasion, hackers demanded from
the local government a payment of more than $10K USD via Bitcoin transfers.

The perpetrators of these attacks blocked
access to the city’s email server, as well as temporarily shutting down the
databases of the various Baltimore government systems, such as records of traffic
fines, taxes and vehicle control.

International Institute of Cyber Security
(IICS) system audit specialists believe that this fact, along with the series
of ransomware attacks against Baltimore and Florida, could have some link to
each other. However, checking this hypothesis can take a long time; before so,
IT employees in affected governments and private companies must conclude with
their process of cybersecurity incident recovering. In addition, to corroborate
the relationship between these facts it is necessary to analyze factors such as
the mode of operation of the threat actors, the ransomware variants used, the
messages sent to the victims, as well as the Bitcoin addresses used to receive
the ransoms. 

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