22 Texas Towns Hit With Ransomware Attack

Originally published at: 22 Texas Towns Hit With Ransomware Attack | Infostormer.com

An increasing number of government systems are coming under attack from ransomware and other cyberattacks. There’s been a long list of them this in just this year alone. This recent attack that has impacted 22 Texas towns is just the latest in a long string them.

NPR:

Texas is the latest state to be hit with a cyberattack, with state officials confirming this week that computer systems in 22 municipalities have been infiltrated by hackers demanding a ransom. A mayor of one of those cities said the attackers are asking for $2.5 million.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and state cybersecurity experts are examining the ongoing breach, which began Friday morning and has affected mostly smaller local governments. Officials have not disclosed which specific places are affected.

Investigators have also not yet identified who or what is behind the attack that took the systems offline, but the Texas Department of Information Resources says the evidence so far points to “one single threat actor.”

The reason why these types of attacks are on the rise is because the federal government failed to secure their cyberweapons. These cyberweapons were released out into the wild and variations of these cyberweapons have been used to launch attacks on government systems. It’s safe to assume that some of these attacks were only made possible because of this.

The morons running our national security thought it would be a great idea to have cyberweapons giving them back doors into all sorts of hardware and software. But they failed to comprehend what would happen if their cyberweapons got compromised.

This is the end result of their idiocy and incompetence. If there was any proper leadership in these organizations, they would have worked with hardware and software vendors to better secure their products.

But no, instead they wanted backdoors so they could play God. What a bunch of fools. They hurt our overall security posture with their hubris.

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Heh. I wouldn’t bet that San Antonio isn’t one of the towns that got a dose of this happening.

One reason is that SA is big enough that they might-just possibly-be able to come up with that kind of cash in a hurry.

Another reason is that SA isn’t some place I’d expect to have a good IT security program in place. It might,but it would honestly surprise me to find out that such is the case.

So who knows? If sales taxes go up a little bit in the next couple of months,or there’s some other fairly innocuous rate hike somewhere that isn’t big enough to get pitchforks waving,but raises 5 or 10 million over a year,my bet would be they had to pay off a hacker and then had to shell out for improved security.

A couple of towns have paid the ransoms too. There is no fucking way the data they would lose is worth that sum of money. Makes me sick

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