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Security United States Technology

Louisiana Governor Declares State Emergency After Local Ransomware Outbreak (zdnet.com) 141

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards has activated a state-wide state of emergency in response to a wave of ransomware infections that have hit multiple school districts. ZDNet reports: The ransomware infections took place this week and have impacted the school districts of three North Louisiana parishes -- Sabine, Morehouse, and Ouachita. IT networks are down at all three school districts, and files have been encrypted and are inaccessible, local media outlets are reporting. By signing the Emergency Declaration, the Louisiana governor is making available state resources to impacted schools. This includes assistance from cybersecurity experts from the Louisiana National Guard, Louisiana State Police, the Office of Technology Services, the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), and others. State officials hope that additional IT expertise will speed up the recovery process so schools can resume their activity and preparations for the upcoming school year. Earlier today, some residents of Johannesburg have been left without electricity after a ransomware infection.
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Louisiana Governor Declares State Emergency After Local Ransomware Outbreak

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  • This is what you get when everyone is Anti-Vax. Chicken Pox, Measles and Ransomware.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps they havent heard of them down in the south yet? Ransomwarezzzz? "ohh bummer.. i guess we will loose todays data, but thanks to our backup strategy it is ONLY todays data". Said no government entity ever, besides the 3 letter agencies (fbi excluded) of course

  • by Revek ( 133289 ) on Thursday July 25, 2019 @10:07PM (#58988682)

    Substandard employees that they hire. They will blame IT first. Ideally their IT should have proper backups that are air gaped at some part of the process. But ultimately these things happen because clueless employees allow it to happen.

    • Heavens! Are you saying that getting the cheapest contractors they can find isn't the best financial decision they could have made? But those nice MBAs assured them that running things like a cutthroat corporation was the best way!

      • by Revek ( 133289 )

        Heavens no. For instance I know of a city municipality that has the wan side of their internet merged with the lan side of their network. potentially exposing their whole infrastructure. I know and I told them but they would rather trust the guy who did the wiring to know more about networking than the guy who configured their fiber circuit. I'm sure that when they get their asses hacked again they will try to cast the net wide looking for anyone other than themselves to blame. That is why I fired off

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, the MBA morons think that one unit of "employee xyz" is of course exactly the same as another one. Hence getting the cheapest ones does make sense to them. It is a sure recipe for an eventual collapse, of course.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's almost certainly the fault of the person who set the budget.

      Next on the list is IT, because any plan which requires the users to not make mistakes is bound to fail.

      • by Revek ( 133289 )

        The city I've mentioned in a previous post uses a company that can't keep decent it staff. They pay their techs a maximum of $15 dollars an hour. As soon as their people get a little experience, they move on. Their current IT guy thinks a factory reset on the router is required to do anything to it. He has reset it twice and left them without internet. The next time I'm not going to bail them out. The pretty much burned a bridge with me and I only have to wait until it goes down and stays down a day

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Yep.

        What kills me about the low-tax, free market crowd is that they don't seem to be able to link these ideas together. If you want competent teachers and other school staff, you need to pay enough that competent people want to do that job.

        Starting salary around here for a teacher who has to have a bachelor's degree at minimum, with a master's preferred is mid-$50k. For someone with a BA in English, that's not bad. But how do you get someone with a MS in a STEM field for that sort of money, when they could,

    • Lol I agree! I feel like the first people to blame IT for their problems are also most likely the most incompetent in terms of technology.
  • Move along everybody nothing to see here.Pay no attention to that naked man behind the curtain.
  • I wonder if IT gets the budget it needs (for backups), or slashed and someone fired.

    I got nothing (just like Louisiana).

  • Miss the days (Score:4, Insightful)

    by imagekiwi ( 2527670 ) on Friday July 26, 2019 @12:01AM (#58989056)

    Miss the days where tyhe mojority of slashdot comments focused on the technical side and steered away from the political side of things. Mind you the headline doesn't give anything away about to which type of ransomware!

    • My guess is ryuk. It is really hot right now, and usually targeted with enough pre-discovery to hose the backups before triggering. It is nasty, unless you have totally out of band backups somewhere.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      On the technical side, is most of this ransomware still using old NSA exploits? It sounds like they haven't been keeping their systems up to date.

    • As do I, but it reflects a deliberate editorial slant away from tech and of course, laziness.

    • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      To further your point, we *need* to know the technical side because if the hackers are using exploits developed by the NSA, then we need to hold the NSA accountable. The US government needs to be helping companies secure themselves, not providing tools to hackers. This concept of developing advanced threats then holding onto them is foolish and the mindset needs to change. If you hold onto a known threat you put *everyone* at risk, not just the bad guys.

  • Not a fan. If I had sent the ransomware your way I'd delete the encryption keys. You don't deserve to have your data back.

  • when i was in school in the late 90s we kept all are data from computers on external storage so if a computer failed it was easy to reset it and be back up before the next class. clearly there not doing this anymore if they need a state of emergency to deal with the ransomware vs restoring from backups.
    • by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Friday July 26, 2019 @05:38AM (#58989826)

      when i was in school in the late 90s we kept all are data from computers on external storage

      I'm curious - what school(s) did you go to? Where I live, they pretty much teach you how to spell "our" pretty early, and don't let you get away with the "are" spelling from a very early age....

    • Deep Freeze and relatives make restoration of workstations as easy as a reboot, and some of the solutions are free. Many schools use it since the only thing deadlier than ransomware is student users.

      • None of the software-only solutions are particularly worth deploying. Clever malware will find those partitions and eat them anyway.

  • For years, malware was used for things like nabbing credit card numbers and selling them on the black market, or for sending spam emails. Deleting files and defacing web sites was good for the lulz, but nobody made money off that. But two concepts changed all that: Ransomware + Cryptocurrency. Now, ransoming files is safe AND profitable! Expect to see more and more of this.

    Ransomware is really kinda genius when you think of it as a business model. The hacker steals the files - but does not need to stor

  • rather than having effective government, we simply have government that gives our money to their friends. yeah.
  • ... but if this turns pandemic, maybe we'll finally get a goddam resolution.

    The only fucking thing that works within budget is to have offline backups.

    For ransomware, they don't even have to be offsite (which they should be for disaster response).

    Change backup media out every day for two weeks. EHD are very cheap as a third-level safe harbour.

    It's the only strategy guaranteed to work.

    --

    All those gold-plated enterprise-level solutions involving user education, expensive over-hyped hardware and software solut

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