Tag Archive for: cost

Ryuk ransomware recovery cost us $8.1m and counting, says Baltimore school authority • The Register

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An organisation whose network was infected by Ryuk ransomware has spent $8.1m over seven months recovering from it – and that’s still not the end of it, according to US news reports.

The sum, spent by Baltimore County Public Schools, will doubtless raise some eyebrows and the public breakdown of the costs will be eye-opening for the infosec industry and potential corporate ransomware victims alike.

A spreadsheet obtained by Fox 45 News Baltimore, a TV station, revealed the $8.1m spending and also broke it down into individual line items.

Of the full sum, $2m alone was spent on “ERP cloud transition and recovery” with provider CGI. A Dell (VMware) Carbon Black cloud-based endpoint security licence for one year of Windows protection came in at $699,298, while $606,648 was spent on device monitoring and tracking.

Just $2m of the $8m spend was covered by insurance, the spreadsheet showed, also noting $11,500 in ransomware negotiation costs. There was no line item explaining whether a ransom was paid or if so, how much it was.

As we reported when it first happened, the BCPS network was infected by Ryuk ransomware in November last year. 115,000 children were unable to access remote classes (being held online due to the pandemic) and were cut off from school for a week while administrators rebuilt critical systems.

The attention of news outlets moved on after a few days (possibly a result of BCPS’ $50,000 spend with FTI Consulting on PR advice), but the enduring tech and financial damage is still being felt months later.

Infosec firm Sophos said in April that the average cost of getting over a ransomware attack is $2m, a sum that “has more than doubled in a year”. Last year French-headquartered IT outsourcer Sopra Steria said a Ryuk attack was set to cost it between 40 and 50 million euros after “a previously…

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You can get three of these 4K home security cameras for less than the cost of a single Nest Cam Outdoor

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Hackers want millions in ransom. American schools are considering the cost.

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The ransomware attack on her daughter’s school was the last thing Glynnis Sanders needed.

Like most parents, Sanders has been performing a daily juggling act. When she’s not teaching special education classes at Buffalo Public Schools, she and her husband are usually making sure their three kids are attending their remote classes.

So it hit hard when hackers struck the school of her youngest daughter in early March, the Friday before she was supposed to finally return to in-person learning twice a week.

“It’s very frustrating. You think, how could this happen? You wonder if your information is secure,” Sanders said. “It’s just the headache of Covid as it is, and it’s adding to the stress of the school year. Like what else could happen?”

The hackers infected Buffalo’s schools with malicious code that spidered through their networks, freezing computers and making it impossible for teachers to reach their students who were working remotely because of the pandemic. They demanded a ransom to make it go away.

School officials canceled remote classes for the day while they figured out what to do. They would end up needing more than a week to resume their planned class schedule. A single infection of a school district can affect dozens or hundreds of schools: Buffalo counts 63 individual schools and learning systems.

In public statements, Buffalo Public Schools referred to what happened broadly as a “cybersecurity attack.” But it wasn’t a mindless act of internet vandalism. Buffalo had become the latest in a long spree of ransomware attacks, a type of hack where malicious software locks as many related computers as possible, rendering files inaccessible in an attempt to coerce victims to pay up.

Image: Libby March for NBC News Glynnis Sanders, a parent with children in the Buffalo school system, on April 2, 2021. (Libby March / NBC News)

Image: Libby March for NBC News Glynnis Sanders, a parent with children in the Buffalo school system, on April 2, 2021. (Libby March / NBC News)

The attack underscores how a once obscure form of cybercrime now preys on Americans almost daily. While some ransomware gangs spend months targeting large businesses in hopes of a giant payday, many also go after institutions that don’t have dedicated cybersecurity staff or expensive cybersecurity contracts to better protect them from…

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Unemployment Benefits Fraud Could Cost $300 Billion Nationwide – NBC 7 San Diego

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Billions of dollars have been stolen from California’s unemployment benefits. Criminals have targeted the state’s Employment Development Department, which was unprepared for the wave of applications it received because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Those benefits have attracted the largest cyber attack in terms of fraud in American history,” said Blake Hall, CEO of the authentication company ID.me. “The fraud rates that we’re seeing are over 10 times what we usually see at federal agencies.”

ID.me is a company used to verify that people are who they say they are. Hall says they’ve worked to verify identities everywhere from the Social Security Administration to doctors writing prescriptions for medication.

“Identity verification is an enormously complex space,” said Hall.

Hall says if you had talked about increasing the security of California’s unemployment department’s computer systems a year and a half ago, no one would have taken you seriously.

“EDD, like many of the other state workforce agencies we work with, are on 1980s technology,” said Hall. “We have a duty to sound the alarm bell to say if you’re going to distribute $600, $700 billion in aid, you better make sure you have the right security measures in place.”

Part of the problem is many of our authentication systems are out of date.

“We have been focusing on where the bad guys were, not where they are,” said James Lee, COO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “The whole unemployment fraud situation has been the biggest wakeup call in a decade.”

That fraud is hurting people who actually need the money. Hall says criminals are applying for the checks in California because it is a richer state. That means the fake applications are clogging up the system.

“We have always seen a fraud rate north of 50% every single time,” said Hall. “If a criminal files in the name of somebody who needs unemployment, if that person files second, they’re going to get locked out.”

That means if someone has your information, they could steal the money that you qualify for. Hall showed NBC 7 screenshots from chat rooms on the dark web listing drivers licenses and other identifying information for sale.

“When you…

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