By Bob Walsh
The Muni-Metro is one of the intersecting and overlapping transit systems in the San Francisco bay area. Riders got free rides much of Friday and Saturday. This wasn't because the management was feeling generous. They had been hacked with a ransomware attack and refused to cough up the 100 Bitcoin ($73,000) ransom.
Instead they locked the fare gates open, called in all their I.T. people and contacted Homeland Security. By Saturday morning they had purged the ransomware from their system and were back up and running again from their deep back-up files.
The attack went after Muni's email system and payroll system. The trains control system and fare collection systems are protected by very robust firewalls which were never breached.
These cretins typically demand a low enough ransom that it is easier to pay them than to deal with the problems they cause. That is what makes these ransom attacks attractive to those who initiate them. The people or business or government agency that is attacked often does not want it generally known how vulnerable they were and often simply pay up.
1 comment:
Yep. Our dependence on the web may be our demise.
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