Tag Archive for: Fights

Oak Brook fights cybersecurity attack from foreign hackers

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Oak Brook was the target of a recent organized cybersecurity attack, which appears to have originated in Iran and included a ransom demand.

“The attacker made a ransom demand, which the village has refused to succumb to,” Village Manager Greg Summers said of the June 19 incident. “Our early alert system, swift action, and extensive network of backups provided the necessary measures to secure our data and restore any encrypted files.”

He said the village is not aware of any evidence of any customer or employee data being compromised or misused as a result of the situation.

Summers said village staff took immediate action, suspending all affected systems to isolate the attack, notifying authorities and activating a network of information technology, cyber defense, and legal professionals, including a third-party forensic team to resolve the situation.

“The village employs several network monitoring systems, which are constantly scanning for illicit network activity,” Summers said. “Just as designed, those systems identified the threat activity and notified Information Technology staff immediately.”

Summer said computer system forensic analysis identified failed attempts to access the village’s systems on June 18, but no breaches occurred until the early morning hours of June 19. He said that for security reasons, the nature of the initial breach is not being identified by village staff or officials.

Due to extensive forward planning and a number of backup systems in place, no data was lost as a result of the breach, Summers said.

“The attacker was able to initiate some data encryption, but early alerts and swift action from Information Technology staff largely thwarted this effort,” he said, adding that backup data files were used to recover any encrypted data.

“All delays in village systems have been a result of both data restoration and hardening of defense mechanisms prior to placing systems back online,” Summers said. “There was no data loss and all village systems have been brought back online, but are being periodically brought up and down for analysis and updates.”

Summers said based on a thorough evaluation of the village’s computer system, there is…

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TrustedSec now fights cyber threats from new headquarters in Fairlawn

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David Kennedy, founder and CEO of TrustedSec, has opened a new corporate headquarters in Fairlawn that will serve as a national hub for cybersecurity services, research and testing.

Someone right now is tapping away at a computer keyboard, scanning lines of code of a company’s website or database, poking around for weaknesses to exploit.

If that company is lucky, that person on a keyboard is someone working for TrustedSec, whose employees are hired by firms to hack their systems so they can address any weaknesses.

“Companies will hire us to serve as hackers, so they can protect themselves from the bad hackers,” said David Kennedy, 39, the founder and CEO of the company.

There have been several well-publicized cybersecurity hacks that show the damage that someone with ill intent and a computer can accomplish, such as the Colonial Pipeline hack and a ransomware attack that hit a Texas town. Protecting information that is stored online and electronically is critical.

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Local municipality fights ‘cyber security incident’ after flood of spam emails

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File photo
File photo

Elgin County has hired outside consultant to help it recover from a “technical disruption” that’s downed its website and email system weeks after warning a “cyber security incident” had targeted the local government, The Free Press has learned.

The London-area local government’s website was down Friday as its information technology department and a third-party expert worked through the system-wide issue, the county’s top administrator said.

“We’re still determining the root cause,” chief administrator Julie Gonyou wrote in an online message exchange on Friday. “The website and external incoming/outgoing email are down while we assess the root cause of the technical disruption and work to resolve a number of technical issues.”

The website and email outage comes two weeks after Gonyou, in an internal memo to county staff reviewed by The Free Press, warned that officials were dealing with a “cyber security incident” and had brought in a consultant to help fix it.

In the memo emailed on March 31, Gonyou wrote county officials were concerned by a large amount of spam emails sent to Elgin County staff. Many of the emails contained malicious attachments or links and were sent from emails doctored to look like they were legitimate senders, Gonyou’s email noted.

The memo stated county officials were watching closely for any potential data breaches and warned it was possible the volume of spam emails could become unmanageable, forcing a temporary shutdown of the email system.

Elgin has cyber security insurance and is working with an adjuster for its insurance company, which has offered “resources and supports,” the internal email noted.

The cyber disruption is being felt across multiple Elgin County departments.

Officials with the…

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IKEA fights against hacker attack, an email ransomware

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IKEA is currently undergoing a large-scale cyberattack, large enough for the Swedish company to send an email to its employees warning about the issue: hackers intend to use ransomware to hijack employee computers.

The email in question has been disclosed by the BleepingComputer medium, and it contains some details about the cyberattack, which is still ongoing, and how it is trying to distribute it through the company’s internal email. IKEA asks employees not to open any email, whoever it is

Employees are also told to tell the sender of the emails, via Microsoft Teams chat, to report the content of the emails, to avoid opening the email that way.

At the moment the details on how many computers have been infected have not been made public, but from what appears from the email, it seems that they have it under control. If they have managed to alert employees, it is because the main email servers of the company have not been affected.

This type of attack can spread across the network after one or more computers are infected for the first time. Once distributed, you can block all of them by asking for a release ransom, as explained in the article How to avoid ransomware attacks.

Yes, companies related to IKEA have been affected, such as suppliers, for example, who have seen how some of their servers were blocked by the same type of email.

For now, the IKEA IT team has been quarantining suspicious emails, emails that have links with several digits at the end.

Both the online purchases and the service in physical stores continue to function normally, and everything will continue this way if the employees follow the instructions mentioned above. Unfortunately, since you just get lost, the problem can be huge.

More information at bleepingcomputer.com, where they explain the type of attack and the malicious files that will be executed if someone clicks on the links in the circulating emails.

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