Texas struck by two ransomware attacks in one week

Texas’ condition authorities has been impacted by two ransomware attacks in considerably less than a 7 days.

The Texas Division of Transportation (DOT) was hit with a ransomware assault past Thursday, the DOT announced on Friday.

“The Texas Division of Transportation decided that on May perhaps fourteen, 2020, there was unauthorized entry to the agency’s network in a ransomware celebration. TxDOT immediately took steps to isolate the incident and shut down further more unauthorized entry. In addition, the company immediately began performing with federal legislation enforcement,” the statement, which was posted on the department’s Facebook webpage, read through. “TxDOT is performing intently with the FBI to discover the particular person(s) dependable and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the legislation.”

It can be unclear if the ransomware assault was successful and if so, what products and services have been disrupted by the assault. SearchSecurity tried to phone six unique telephone figures for the Texas DOT, but none of the calls linked. In addition, the website’s e-mail call sort was down at push time.

The past Friday, the Texas courts ended up disrupted when the state’s Workplace of Court docket Administration (OCA) was hit with ransomware that led to its network remaining disabled in order to restrict distribute. In a statement on Twitter, the OCA explained it would not pay out the ransom and extra that the destruction from the assault was mitigated since several of its IT techniques had a short while ago been migrated to the cloud, and people assets ended up not afflicted.

The Lone Star State is no stranger to ransomware attacks on authorities networks. Previous August, a one ransomware assault hit 22 neighborhood governments in Texas, which showcased an all round ransom demand of $two.five million.

A report by Recorded Foreseeable future past year famous that ransomware attacks on neighborhood and condition governments are on the rise. A more recent report by Kaspersky famous a great deal of the same factor. Noteworthy attacks on authorities networks in excess of the past a number of a long time incorporate Colorado, Louisiana and Baltimore, among the several others. The Colorado incident was a highly publicized SamSam assault that hit the state’s DOT in February 2018.

Maria J. Danford

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