Ransomware attack sends US county back to 1977

Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data. "Services that depend on access to county databases are temporarily unavailable, such as land records, vital statistics, and probate records. Title searches are possible …

[sanmigueelbeer]

China is a Russian "ally" -- Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure

So what if China has been hacking Russian companies? What can Russia do, launch an attack into China?

[Version 1.0]

Re: China is a Russian "ally" -- Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure

If I was in Russia and creating Malware I'd make it look like it was from China, and if I was in China creating Malware I'd make it look like it had Russian origins. But if I was in North Korea writing malware I'd add some indicators to give people both of the two "sources" to everything.

Malware is everywhere ... this is malware-change these days, all organizations need to start assuming that they will be hacked and all their data lost, moving to an environment where there is zero-zero access to their data from outside and only read-only access internally. Update the data internally via a keyboard with multiple inaccessible backups.

Sure - this is not going to be easy but malware is easy so everything harder is safer.

[b0llchit]

Rise of the machines

AI can 'catch and kill malware' in 0.3 seconds

It surely looks like SkyNet. It also starts to smell like SkyNet. Please do not connect to missiles or it will be(come) SkyNet.

[Oh Matron!]

Re: Rise of the machines

I wouldn;t be too worried about terminators.... I'd be more worried about a threat actor uploading a bogus firmware update to john deer tractors. That would result in a horrible famine!

[b0llchit]

Re: Rise of the machines

But everybody can easily repair their own tractor, can't they? Hello? Hello...?

_{(I think the internet is down)}

[iron]

Re: Rise of the machines

I was thinking it sounds a bit like Soulkiller from Cyberpunk, that's an AI too.

[J.G.Harston]

" it has a 14 percent false positive rate that "remains too high to adopt this approach as-is," the researchers wrote."

That's seven times better than the AV on my machine that complains every time I try to save over an existing RTF document.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rich Text

Do you really use RTF (Rich Text Format)? It's a strange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format "missing link" within:

plain text -> wiki text -> full on word processor/DTP

The wiki page alleges that it was yet another attempt by MS to take the piss, competitively speaking. I think it was an early MS attempt at getting to grips with how to do anti-competitiveness.