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Cybersecurity officials warn state and local agencies (again) to fend off ransomware

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A uniformed police officer stands outside a courthouse with a rotunda.

Enlarge / Georgia State Police and Capitol Police had their laptops taken offline by ransomware in the latest of many attacks on state and local government agencies. (credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Yesterday, the Georgia Department of Public Safety revealed that laptop computers in state police and Capitol police vehicles—as well as laptops used by Georgia’s Motor Carrier Compliance Division (the officers who operate trucking scales and safety spot checks)—had been taken offline by ransomware. The attack comes a week after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a statewide emergency after “a malware attack on a few North Louisiana school systems,” bringing state resources to assist in the response. And also last week, the city power company in Johannesburg, South Africa, was hit by ransomware, taking down payment systems and causing power outages.

These are just the latest episodes in a long line of state and local government organizations that have fallen to ransomware attacks. As Louisiana was declaring a state of emergency, the Board of Estimates of the City of Baltimore was approving $ 10 million in spending to recover from the city’s nearly month-long IT outage caused by the RobbinHood ransomware. So today, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), the National Governors Association (NGA), and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) issued a warning urging organizations to take immediate steps to protect themselves against ransomware attacks. The hope is that state and local agencies will heed the warning and blunt the damage being done by recent ransomware variants.

The three steps urged by CISA, MS-ISAC, NGA, and NASCIO are fairly basic security hygiene: run daily backups, train staff on “cybersecurity awareness,” and “revisit and refine cyber incident response plans.” Unfortunately, these three steps may be beyond the capabilities of the organizations most likely to be hit by ransomware—school districts, government agencies, and small and mid-sized businesses that have IT budgets that place them below the information security poverty line.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Ubisoft Once Again Crowdsourcing Content For Video Game, Once Again Gets Unwarranted Backlash

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Between crowdsourcing and the explosion of indie video game developers, many of which are far more permissive in IP realms and far better at actually connecting with their fans, we are perhaps entering a golden age for fan involvement in the video games they love. And it’s not just the indie developers getting into this game either; the AAA publishers are, too. One example of this came up last year, when Ubisoft worked with HitRECord to allow fans of the Beyond Good and Evil franchise to submit potential in-game music creations. On HitRECord, other fans would be able to vote and even remix those works. At the end of it all, any music Ubisoft used for Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be paid for out of a pool of money the company had set aside. Cool, right?

Not for some in the gaming industry itself. Many who work in the industry decried Ubisoft’s program as denying those who make music professionally income for the creation of the game music. Others called Ubisoft’s potential payment to fans for their creations “on-spec” solicitations, in which companies only pay for work that actually makes it into the game, a practice that is seen as generally unethical in the industry. Except neither of those criticisms were accurate. Ubisoft specifically carved out a few places for fans to put music into the game, not the entire game. And the “on-spec” accusation would only make sense if these fans were in the gaming music industry, which they weren’t. Instead, Ubisoft was actually just trying to connect with its own fans and create a cool program in which those fans could contribute artistically to the game they love, and even make a little money doing so.

Fortunately, Ubisoft has apparently not let the criticism keep it from continuing with these experiments, as the company has put out the call for the same sort of program for its next Watchdogs game.

Last week, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt ‏announced on Twitter that his music production company, HitRecord, would once again partner with Ubisoft, this time to help the publisher create 10 songs for its upcoming open world hacker game, Watch Dogs: Legion. This immediately re-ignited an old debate about the ethics of soliciting work for big budget games from fans.

“10 original songs. Collaboratively made for #WatchDogsLegion. By YOU. Come play w/ us,” Gordon-Levitt tweeted on July 11. According to the FAQ on Ubisoft’s website, the publisher will be paying $ 20,000 for the original music which will be played during the game, like, as one example offered, while you’re driving around the game’s version of London. At $ 2,000 per song, the proceeds will end up being paid out through HitRecord to whichever of the platform’s users helped create the music.

Once again, you have to really, really work hard to find something unethical in any of that. And, yet, all of the same criticisms are arising. On the one hand, sure, it’s mildly understandable that creatives don’t like being routed around by gaming companies. On the other hand, it’s hard to come off as more anti-fan than complaining about a $ 20k payout for 10 fan-made songs within a professional game. And yet again, here come the complaints about this being some flavor of on-spec work.

“This sucks,” tweeted Mike Bithell, developer of Thomas Was Alone and the upcoming John Wick Hex game, under the “nospec” hashtag. “Pay people for their labour. Stop exploiting fans and hobbyists, while devaluing the work of those with the gall to actually expect consistent payment for work done. Do better Ubi, we’re counting on you.”

“I am still not a fan of what read[s] as ‘spec work under a proprietary open non-exclusive license’ model, & prefer the ‘pay someone to browse SoundCloud to find cool music for which you then talk to the creator & pay them too,’” tweeted Vambleer’s Rami Ismail.

And yet the fans appear to love this, having contributed to the previous game enough that Ubisoft wanted to do it all over again. Here’s the thing: if professional video game music composers are confident in their work, they really shouldn’t see this as some kind of a huge threat. And I say that as someone that loves video game music. A game company trying to get fans involved in certain parts of the game creation isn’t some great evil. It’s CwF+RtB, which is something we like around these parts.

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