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Thread: Ransomware gangs get more aggressive against law enforcement

  1. #1
    banana republican blues's Avatar
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    Ransomware gangs get more aggressive against law enforcement

    https://apnews.com/article/ransomwar...61fb71bf91a42a



    RICHMOND, Va., (AP) — Police Chief Will Cunningham came to work four years ago to find that his six-officer department was the victim of a crime.

    Hackers had taken advantage of a weak password to break in and encrypt the files of the department in Roxana, a small town in Illinois near St. Louis, and were demanding $6,000 of bitcoin.

    “I was shocked, I was surprised, frustrated,” Cunningham said.

    Police departments big and small have been plagued for years by foreign hackers breaking into networks and causing varying level of mischief, from disabling email systems to more serious problems with 911 centers temporarily knocked offline. In some cases important case files have gone missing.

    But things have taken a dark turn recently. Criminal hackers are increasingly using brazen methods to increase pressure on law enforcement agencies to pay ransoms, including leaking or threatening to leak highly sensitive and potentially life-threatening information.

    The threat of ransomware has risen to a level that’s impossible to ignore, with hardly a day going by without news of a hospital, private business or government agency being victimized. On Saturday, the operator of a major pipeline system that transports fuel across the East Coast said it had been victimized by a ransomware attack and had halted all pipeline operations to deal with the threat.

    The increasingly defiant attacks on law enforcement agencies underscore how little ransomware gangs fear repercussions.

    In Washington, D.C., a Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate called Babuk hacked into the network of the city’s police department and threatened to leak the identities of confidential informants unless an unspecified ransom was paid.

    A day after the initial threat was posted in late April, the gang tried to spur payment by leaking personal information of some police officers taken from background checks, including details of officers’ past drug use, finances and — in at least one incident — of past sexual abuse.

    Similar threats were made recently against a small police force in Maine. The police department in Dade City, a small town in Florida, currently has many of its files posted on the dark web by the ransomware gang Avaddon after the city decided not to pay the $450,000 worth of bitcoin that was demanded. Leaked files show pictures of a dead body from a crime scene.

    Ransomware gangs have been leaking sensitive data from victims for well over a year, but experts said they’ve not seen such aggressive new tactics used before against police departments.

    “It should be a wake-up call to government that it finally needs to take strong and decisive action,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the security firm Emsisoft.

    Making the ransomware attacks potentially more damaging, police are now able to collect and store more personal information than ever before through advances in surveillance equipment and technologies such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition software.

    April Doss, the executive director of the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law School, said laws and regulations about how police collect, retain and secure that data are largely unsettled.

    “Where that leaves us is with police departments getting to use a great deal of their own discretion in terms of what technologies they adopt and how they use them,” said Doss, who previously worked at the National Security Agency and recently wrote a book on cyberprivacy.

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has called ransomware a “threat to national security” and said the issue is a top priority of the White House. Congress is exploring giving state and local governments grant money to boost their response to ransomware...cont'd at link above
    There's nothing civil about this war.

    Read: Harrison Bergeron

  2. #2
    Offline backups and 2 factor authentication are not difficult and would deter a LOT of these shenanigans.

  3. #3

    Screw ‘Em

    Sorry, not sorry. If law enforcement is getting rolled in these ransomware incidents, they have demonstrated the governmental maladministration that is borderline criminally negligent. We have absolutely no idea what personal or criminally significant information is going out the door in these hacks. I say that having been the “computer guy” at two smaller departments.

    Until a hammer comes down on shitty CLEOs and sponsoring governments, there will not be adequate response.

    I worked with a statewide project to provide *FREE* advanced cyber security monitoring from the state government to local and special government organizations. The unnamed monitoring system was top shelf, Gartner upper right quadrant, with no local requirements besides a POC email. About half the government IT agencies “got it” and voluntarily signed up for something that would have cost $150k minimum from Dell SecureWorks. The rest of the clowns are like pulling teeth...

    I am familiar with federal side of things too. Plenty of challenges there, with changes aplenty are coming this Congressional session - expect some interesting unintended consequences down the line. Local government needs get with the program.

  4. #4
    banana republican blues's Avatar
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    OPM...I rest my case.

    I've learned to make my peace with the Chinese and Russians having all my personnel, financial and TS clearance documents.
    There's nothing civil about this war.

    Read: Harrison Bergeron

  5. #5
    Abducted by Aliens Borderland's Avatar
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    None of this surprises me. I worked for a local gov't with 3K employees. The network was hacked about 3 or 4 times a year. Everything went down and sometimes it took days to get it operational again. Every server and network drive had to be scrubbed.

    Most of us learned to protect our data using lap tops and not putting them on the network. Of course they did go on the network for maintenance and "upgrades" but I made sure that my data also lived on an external HD someplace before that happened. The network "lost" a lot of data.
    In the P-F basket of deplorables.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Borderland View Post
    None of this surprises me.
    Me either. We've learned nothing.

  7. #7
    Member Greg's Avatar
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    Ransomware attackers have been hammering health care orgs and the companies they work with.

    More people have had their data exposed than you want to know about.
    Don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for that dumb bastard.

  8. #8
    Member Phaedrus's Avatar
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    I studied INFOSEC in college for a couple years til I learned how scary it is. I think I'd rather be shot at! The contemporary internet was never designed for security nor ever intended to be used as we now use it. It's like setting up a tent, then deciding to expand the tent to used to hold the circus...and then when the circus is finished, deciding to use the tent as a bank vault!
    Last edited by Phaedrus; 05-09-2021 at 10:58 PM.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Phaedrus View Post
    I studied INFOSEC in college for a couple years til I learned how scary it is. I think I'd rather be shot at! The contemporary internet was never designed for security nor ever intended to be used as we now use it. It's like setting up a tent, then deciding to expand the tent to used to hold the circus...and then when the circus is finished, deciding to use the tent as a bank vault!
    You Sir, are correct. The "Internet" was designed to "share" information, and it does that quite well.

  10. #10
    Site Supporter
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    One of the guys I work with is pretty much savant level in his computer skills. He used to work in our tech unit and at one point had set up a completely fake department profile just to see what would happen. He said it was virtually no time before Russian and Chinese groups started trying to get in. And this was years before it was publicly known that this was as common as it is.
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