LONDON, England: Reuters has reported that a series of ransomware attacks affected servers belonging to the Florida Supreme Court and several universities in the United States and Central Europe.
According to figures collected by Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced platform that tracks digital extortion attempts and online ransom payments, the affected organizations are among more than 3,800 victims of a digital extortion campaign that locked down thousands of servers in Europe over the weekend.
Although the attacks were not particularly sophisticated, the speed of the attacks drew warnings from national cyber watchdogs.
In an interview with Reuters, Florida Supreme Court spokesman Paul Flemming said the affected infrastructure was segregated from the main Supreme Court network and had been used to administer other parts of Florida’s state court system.
“The Florida Supreme Court’s network and data are secure,” he said, adding that the integrity of the rest of the state court system was also unaffected.
Several academic institutions, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University and universities in Hungary and Slovakia, did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
The hackers appear to have extorted only $88,000, a modest amount compared to the multimillion-dollar ransoms demanded by some hacking gangs, Ransomwhere said.
The hackers exploited a two-year-old vulnerability in software developed by VMWare, which prompted customers to upgrade to the latest versions of their software.
“This is nothing unusual. The difference is the scale,” said Patrice Auffret, founder of French Internet scanning company Onyphe, according to Reuters.
Samuli Kononen, an information security specialist at Finland’s National Cyber Security Center, said that many victims had managed to save their data without paying a ransom, indicating that the attack was not very sophisticated.
“More experienced ransomware groups usually don’t make that kind of mistake,” he said, according to Reuters.
Source: sn.dk
