Tag: emergency | SpinSafe

Missouri county declares state of emergency amid suspected ransomware attack

April 3, 2024/in Internet Security

Enlarge / Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which is part of Jackson County.

Jackson County, Missouri, has declared a state of emergency and closed key offices indefinitely as it responds to what officials believe is a ransomware attack that has made some of its IT systems inoperable.

“Jackson County has identified significant disruptions within its IT systems, potentially attributable to a ransomware attack,” officials wrote Tuesday. “Early indications suggest operational inconsistencies across its digital infrastructure and certain systems have been rendered inoperative while others continue to function as normal.”

The systems confirmed inoperable include tax and online property payments, issuance of marriage licenses, and inmate searches. In response, the Assessment, Collection and Recorder of Deeds offices at all county locations are closed until further notice.

The closure occurred the same day that the county was holding a special election to vote on a proposed sales tax to fund a stadium for MLB’s Kansas City Royals and the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Neither the Jackson County Board of Elections nor the Kansas City Board of Elections have been affected by the attack; both remain open.

To date, ransomware attacks have hit 28 county, municipal, or tribal governments this year, according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst with security firm Emsisoft. Last year, there were 95; 106 occurred in 2022.

The Jackson County website says there are 654,000 residents in the 607-square-mile county, which includes most of Kansas City, the biggest city in Missouri.

The response to the attack and the investigation into it have just begun, but so far, officials said they had no evidence that data had been compromised.

“We are currently in the early stages of our diagnostic procedures, working closely with our cybersecurity partners to thoroughly explore all possibilities and identify the root cause of the situation,” officials wrote. “While the investigation considers ransomware as a…

Source…

TAD to hold emergency meeting Monday to address ransomware attack

March 23, 2024/in Internet Security

The Tarrant Appraisal District will hold an emergency board meeting March 25 after a criminal ransomware attack disrupted the agency’s network March 21, causing the website to crash.

The district has taken steps to secure the network and is working with cybersecurity experts to investigate, respond and restore the network, it said in a press release.

The incident was reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Texas Department of Information Resources.

The website is now live again, but emails and phone lines remain down.

Appraisal board member Alan Blaylock, who is also a Fort Worth City Council member, said board members anticipate receiving more detailed information at the March 25 meeting.

“I think that the chief appraiser and the new team are going to great pains to communicate all they can as they are able,” Blaylock said, “and I expect that there will be significant communication coming forward early next week as investigations into what happened continue.”

This is the second criminal cyberattack on the appraisal district’s website. In October 2022, a security breach potentially exposed sensitive taxpayer information. However, the final report found that data was not stolen.

Ransomware attacks were on the rise in 2023, according to data from the FBI. More than 2,800 complaints about ransomware were reported last year, including 156 from government facilities.

Source…

UnitedHealth Exploits an ‘Emergency’ It Created

March 12, 2024/in Internet Security

Last Thursday, the medical colossus UnitedHealthcare applied for an emergency exemption that would fast-track its takeover of a medical practice in Corvallis, Oregon, in a letter warning regulators that the practice might close its doors if the merger were not approved right away.

Although the specific reason for the exemption request is redacted from the publicly posted version of the application, a clinic insider says the “emergency” is the same one that has plunged thousands of other health providers across the nation into a terrifying cash crunch: the weeks-long outage of UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare clearinghouse and claims processing systems, which has halted the flow of information that enables physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to get paid for their work.

“Our claims processing goes through [Change], so all of a sudden there was no money coming in,” the insider, an employee of The Corvallis Clinic who did not want to be identified for fear of jeopardizing the transaction, told the Prospect. The clinic’s shareholders, who include include more than half of its 110 physicians and one of its behavioral health providers, worked without pay last week in order to “scrape together enough money to pay the staff,” the insider said, but on Thursday the shareholders explained that they weren’t sure they would be able to open the doors Monday without an emergency cash injection. “They’re praying that the sale’s going to go through and that Optum will front them the money.”

More from Maureen Tkacik

The situation underscores the perverse state of affairs in which UnitedHealth, which comprises some 2,642 separate companies that collectively raked in $371.6 billion last year, has arguably profited from the desperation that the hacking of its Change computer systems in late February has inflicted upon the health care system. An estimated half of all health care transactions are processed or somehow otherwise touched by Change, a rollup of dozens of health care technology firms that provide 137 software applications that have been affected by the outage.

Every dollar in revenue that has disappeared from hospitals, medical…

Source…