Recently, several organisations and state entities experienced debilitating ransomware attacks. With effects varying greatly, IT specialists had a busy week trying to restore systems and decrypt locked files. This article presents last week’s news regarding the ransomware attacks, with the highlight being Baltimore City.   Major Ransomware Attack on Baltimore City On May 7th, 2019,… Read More »

In this article, we bring in the week’s news on the latest ransomware activities, with effects varying across different cases. Most organisations are still coping with the aftermath of these attacks, facing severe hardships. However, there are also few that did manage to recover their services and have repelled the attack.   “We Lost $52… Read More »

In April 2019 several ransomware attacks shut down state-owned organisations’ servers for weeks. Stuart City, Greenville, and Algoma Public Health authorities are still trying to decrypt their files. City officials are collaborating closely with police representatives but decryption takes a long time to finalise.  In most cases, criminals demand a ransom for a decryption code. Authorities… Read More »

Ransomware Attack on Stone Mountain Memorial Association On Thursday, April 11th, 2019, a state-owned organisation that oversees Stone Mountain Park experienced a ransomware attack. Its representative, John Bankhead, stated that the cyberattack did not affect the park, with impacts limited on the organisation only. According to the spokesperson, the association is working closely with the Georgia Bureau… Read More »

Municipal Schools in Taos, NM came under a cyber attack on February 28th with the criminal(s) demanding $5,000 to allow the schools to regain access to their data. The attack has been stopped with most services returned to normal operation. School officials reported that access to email, lessons tech and the local district website were disabled… Read More »

Acronis have recently posted their annual World Backup Survey for 2019 which shows more than 92% of consumers are now backing up their data regularly. This is an increase of over 24% from 2018. They say ‘Backups are Up, and so is Data Loss’   A stark warning: CEOs are increasingly losing their jobs because… Read More »

On the 9th March 2019, the England and Wales Police Federation [PFEW] were subjected to a ransomware attack on the main computer system in their Surrey Headquarters. The attack disabled their email connections and locked them out of their files. This was confirmed in their Twitter feed It took them 12 days to report the… Read More »

An Academy in Dorset has had its GCSE coursework data held ransom by a group of Chinese cyber criminals. The attack took place about two weeks ago at the Sir John Colfox Academy in Bridport. The ransomware attack began when a staff member opened an email which contained a virus.  The email the school received… Read More »

Choosing the right data backup service provider is no easy task as there are so many options available to us nowadays. Whilst some have placed their trust in a private data centre to store their data, choosing Microsoft’s cloud through Azure is arguably the best way to keep your data secure, agile and scalable.  … Read More »

Online systems are great for allowing all employees to access important data in real-time, wherever they may be. It wasn’t that long ago that you would have to VPN into your company’s network to securely access your email and other data. Even then, you would have probably been restricted by the amount of bandwidth you… Read More »