Tag Archive for: suffered

Scranton School District suffered a ransomware attack

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Scranton School District in Pennsylvania suffered a ransomware attack

Pierluigi Paganini
March 16, 2024

School districts continue to be under attack, schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania, are suffering a ransomware attack.

This week, schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania, experienced a ransomware attack, resulting in IT outages. The Scranton School District is working with third-party forensic specialists to investigate the security breach and restore impacted systems.

“The attack is causing a temporary disruption to some of our computer systems and services. We are working diligently with third party forensic specialists, that we engaged last evening, to investigate the source of this incident, confirm its impact on our systems, and to restore full functionality to the system as soon as possible,” reads a post published by the Scranton School District on Facebook they wrote.  

“Scranton School District’s computer system was recently hacked and infected with ransomware, according to acting Superintendent Patrick Laffey.” reported The Time Tribune.

The district ordered school staff not to use any electronic devices and uninstall any school-related apps from their mobile devices, said Rosemary Boland, president of the Scranton Federation of Teachers.

“As you know, some files may be inaccessible during this period as we, and the third-party forensic specialists, continue the investigation. Due to the increased security measures placed in our systems, some functions may be slower than usual.”

The Scranton School District website is not reachable and their Facebook account is not available at the time of this writing.

The Scranton School District is a large, urban school district located in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the Wyoming Valley region. The district encompasses approximately 26 square miles. According to the 2020 census, the Scranton School District serves a resident population of 76,997.

The school district includes 15 schools and serves more than 9000 students.

The Scranton School District reported “network-related issues” on Thursday, the problems caused a disruption for computer systems and services in the District. The issues caused the school…

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Oakland Police Union Seeking Damages Suffered in Ransomware Attack on City – NBC Bay Area

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Oakland police officers have filed a claim against the city for damages suffered due to the ransomware attack on the city in February, officials with the police union said Monday.

The claim was filed Thursday by attorneys for the Oakland Police Officers’ Association, which represents more than 700 officers.

The union is asking for monetary compensation as well as credit monitoring services, bank monitoring services, credit restoration services and identity theft insurance.

“Having to file this legal claim is disappointing,” said police union President Barry Donelan in a statement. “Oakland employees trusted the city with their personal and confidential data, and the city failed them by releasing it through a combination of incompetence and negligence.” City officials, including the mayor’s office, said last week that they would meet with the police union following a threat of litigation.

As of Monday, there hasn’t been a meeting, but union officials said they are optimistic a meeting will occur.

A spokesperson for Mayor Sheng Thao on Monday referred a request for comment to City Attorney Barbara Parker’s office.

Parker’s office did not have a comment Monday, saying the office just received the claim and has not had time to review it. The city was closed Friday for Cesar Chavez Day.

The ransomware attackers released private, personal information of police officers, Donelan said. Reportedly, other employees’ private information was released, too.

The attack started Feb. 8. The attackers crippled the city’s information technology systems and demanded ransom to free the systems.

Attorneys for the police union said the city was repeatedly warned in the past and recently of “significant deficiencies in the security of its information technology systems,” according to the claim filed Thursday.

The claim was filed by the police union’s attorneys Rains, Lucia, Stern, St. Phalle and Silver and is a precondition for filing a lawsuit against the city, attorney Rockne Lucia Jr. said.

“We are currently evaluating all of our options and will make a determination on how to protect the interests of the members of the OPOA in the next few weeks,” Lucia said by email….

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Ukraine Suffered More Data-Wiping Malware in 2022 Than Anywhere, Ever

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Despite that sheer volume of wiper malware, Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine in 2022 have in some respects seemed relatively ineffective compared to previous years of its conflict there. Russia has launched repeated destructive cyberwarfare campaigns against Ukraine since the country’s 2014 revolution, all seemingly designed to weaken Ukraine’s resolve to fight, sow chaos, and make Ukraine appear to the international community to be a failed state. From 2014 to 2017, for instance, Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency carried out a series of unprecedented cyberattacks: They disrupted and then attempted to spoof results for Ukraine’s 2014 presidential election, caused the first-ever blackouts triggered by hackers, and finally unleashed NotPetya, a self-replicating piece of wiper malware that hit Ukraine, destroying hundreds of networks across government agencies, banks, hospitals, and airports before spreading globally to cause a still-unmatched $10 billion in damage.

But since early 2022, Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine have shifted into a different gear. Instead of masterpieces of malevolent code that required months to create and deploy, as in Russia’s earlier attack campaigns, the Kremlin’s cyberattacks have accelerated into quick, dirty, relentless, repeated, and relatively simple acts of sabotage.

In fact, Russia appears, to some degree, to have swapped quality for quantity in its wiper code. Most of the dozen-plus wipers launched in Ukraine in 2022 have been relatively crude and straightforward in their data destruction, with none of the complex self-spreading mechanisms seen in older GRU wiper tools like NotPetya, BadRabbit, or Olympic Destroyer. In some cases, they even show signs of rushed coding jobs. HermeticWiper, one of the first wiping tools that hit Ukraine just ahead of the February 2022 invasion, used a stolen digital certificate to appear legitimate and avoid detection, a sign of sophisticated pre-invasion planning. But HermeticRansom, a variant in the same family of malware designed to appear as ransomware to its victims, included sloppy programming errors, according to ESET. HermeticWizard, an accompanying tool designed to…

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DAA security worker claims he suffered ‘mental turmoil’ following colleagues’ ridicule

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A Dublin Airport security worker has told the Workplace Relations Commission said he suffered “mental turmoil” following alleged ridicule and bullying by co-workers.

The alleged abuse happened after a photograph of the worker playing golf was downloaded from the internet and uploaded onto a work computer.

The WRC heard the Dublin Airport Authority (Daa) employee complained about how he claims he was treated.

But he later resigned from his job, claiming – unsuccessfully – he had been constructively dismissed.

The WRC heard that on July 1, 2019, a personal photo of the man was saved to the screensaver of a work computer used as a training tool for Airport Search Unit employees.

The complainant first found out about the picture the next day when he was confronted by a staff member who showed it to the complainant while – he says – laughing at the same time.

As the day went on, more staff approached the complainant about the picture, commenting on his appearance and – he claimed – laughing about it.

The complainant told his supervisor about the photo and how he was being made to feel by his colleagues.

He claims the supervisor at the time showed “very little interest in the matter” and so he informed his duty manager, saying that it was causing him a lot of stress and anxiety.

The Duty Manager asked Dublin Airport’s IT department to take the photo down, which it did.

Signs were later put up warning that any staff member caught using computers for anything other than work purposes could be sacked.

The complainant claims these signs only furthered the amount of bullying he received.

He told the WRC that colleagues subsequently confronted him “in a more aggressive manner” and accused him of trying to get people sacked.

On July 4, the complainant took the matter to the human resources department, and he asked to be transferred out of the unit he was working in.

As a result, he was deployed to the VIP screening area, but he claims he was still confronted by other staff members about how he had handled the issue and that they told him they would never forget it.

The WRC heard “it was after all of this that the complainant could take no more of the mental abuse, bullying by his…

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