The first and the foremost ransomware news trending on Google is related to Russian hackers targeting work from employees of some multinational firms- including Fortune 500 Companies.
According to a research carried out by Cybersecurity firm Symantec, a noted hacking group from Russia dubbed ‘Evil Corp’ was seen targeting employees working from home and has so far reportedly targeted over 31 organizations in the past three months.
“Almost 31 firms were affected by the attack, and the attack scale has been higher breaching corporate networks to the core and laying the groundwork to launch ransomware attacks”, says Symantec.
Meanwhile, in a similar incident related to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), it’s now confirmed that the educational institute staff paid a ransom of $1.14 million to the criminals for decrypting the data related to the School of Medicine.
As per a report aired on BBC, UCSF was left with no choice rather than to pay the ransom to unlock the database as the stored information was never backed up to any server.
Highly placed sources say that the School of Medicine’s servers belonging to UCSF networks was infected by the file-encrypting malware on June 1st of this year and the encrypted data was related to the operations and research work meant for the treatment of Corona Virus.
As the encrypted data was associated with the academic work of inventing a vaccine/medicine to curb the spread of the COVID 19 pandemic, the IT staff succeeded in negotiating the ransom amount from $3 million to $1.4 million and paid it by June 26th, 2020.
Note- Paying a ransom is against the advice given by Internationally recognized law enforcement agencies such as FBI, Europol, and NCSC- a cyber arm of UK’s GCHQ.
The post Ransomware news trending on Google appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.
June 29, 2020 at 08:47PM
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