Tag Archive for: Local

Local Governments Become Unwitting Malware Vectors

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The bigger the government is, the bigger the target they are for cyberattacks, but at the same time, the bigger their budget for cyber security.

At the lower end of the scale in Australia are 537 local government authorities, which maintain some of the nation’s most critical infrastructure assets and are also at the most risk of cyberattack.

Increasingly, these local government authorities are monitoring their assets with remote sensors and moving into the world of IoT, but at the same time, they have very little in the way of a cybersecurity posture.

These organizations maintain roads, bridges, water services, and waste collection, which are used every day by a population of more than 20 million Australians.

Disrupting these services would play havoc with the economy’s smooth functioning and present as an easy target for increasingly sophisticated “bad actors”.

Call for help

In recognition of this, Linda Scott, the Australian Local Government Association president, has called for more cybersecurity support for the sector after a series of recent attacks.

The ALGA has asked for AUD10 million in funding to assess “local government’s preparedness to deal with cyber-attacks and data breaches.”

The organization is also seeking the appointment of a dedicated chief information security officer to tighten procedures across the sector.

“Local councils are being targeted by ransomware and other phishing cyber threats with the intention of service disruption and stealing valuable information for monetary gain”

The call came after Isaac regional council, which covers an area north of Rockhampton and south of Mackay in Queensland, confirmed it had experienced a security breach in early April.

Isaac chief executive Jeff Stewart-Harris said the council’s IT systems had been shut down to protect against data theft in the wake of the malicious attack, which was identified as ransomware.

“At this stage, we do not have any evidence of large data uploads out of our system; however, this is still being fully investigated, so it can’t be guaranteed,” Stewart-Harris said.

Isaac Council is working with Dell Incident Response and Recovery Services and the Australian CyberSecurity Centre to…

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‘Ransomware cult’ claims to have hacked two local schools

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MATTHEWS, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Finances, legal documents, QuickBooks.

Folders containing sensitive information were published on Twitter by a group claiming to have hacked into Socrates Academy in Matthews and Movement School.

The hackers, which Queen City News has decided not to name, first posted proof of their hack, promising more to come if school officials didn’t cooperate.

“I saw a lot of things I would not want to see if one of my client’s data was breached, like QuickBooks,” said Tom Blanchard, CEO of Sterling Technology Solutions. “I saw financial information. I saw tax information.”

Tom Blanchard, CEO of Sterling Technology Solutions, says he deals with these types of hacks all the time.

“New customers will come to us usually after they’ve already been hacked,” Blanchard told Queen City News.

Neither school replied to our request for comment on the hack.

In the breach, we found copies of checks, a list of parent email addresses, a list of students who were either held back or graduated to the next grade, PayPal payments, tax information, and more.

We called some of the phone numbers exposed in the breach. Some were no longer active. The others went to voicemail.

“One thing that’s very clear in this hack is that access to a server was achieved,” Blanchard said.

Blanchard tells Queen City News hackers typically want to extort people for money or spread information to cause chaos.

“If a school gets hacked, parents are going to be concerned, teachers, students, it’s going to be on the news just like this,” he said.

Perhaps the burning question is why they would target schools. Blanchard believes that, too, is strategic.

“They probably don’t have the largest IT budget in the world, and that makes them more vulnerable to attacks like this,” he said.

Blanchard says the most common delivery method for these ransomware attacks is through email phishing.

It’s not clear if this hack has directly impacted those in the breach, but Blanchard says this type of…

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KnowBe4 Finds State and Local Governments Struggle to Defend Against Ransomware and Business Email Compromise

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KnowBe4 releases The Economic Impact of Cyber Attacks on Municipalities report and finds sectors struggle to defend themselves against cyber attacks due to lack of support

TAMPA BAY, Fla., March 29, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, released a new report showing the continued impact cyber crime is having on state and local governments entitled “The Economic Impact of Cyber Attacks on Municipalities”.

KnowBe4’s report details the financial costs, reputational effects, level of public trust and other impact cyber attacks have on municipalities. The report breaks down the impact cyber attacks have into five target areas: the average financial loss from state and local governments, the denial of service to citizens due to financial loss, the frequency/types of attacks and the risk of recurring attacks, the challenge of allocating capital to prevent attacks and the decline of economic investment in municipalities.

Additionally, the new reports revealed ransomware continues to plague municipalities in all industry sectors. Business email compromise (BEC) attacks were also proven to be one of the most lucrative forms of cyber attacks in 2022, generating billions of dollars lost across all sectors and increasing across all sectors by 175%, with an 81% surge in 2022. State and local governments are particularly vulnerable to these attacks due to government transparency laws which allow cyber criminals to more easily tailor their attack to the victim.

Key findings from the report include:

  • Many municipality cybersecurity budgets are underfunded or do not exist at all. According to the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), most state cybersecurity budgets are between 0% and 3% of their overall IT budget. Additionally, only 18 states have a cybersecurity budget line-item and only 16% of states reported a budget increase of 10% or greater since 2018.

  • The 2022 IC3 Report reveals that in 2022, BEC attacks generated a total of $2,742,354,049 in losses across sectors, an increase of $346 million from 2021, and $875 million from 2020.

  • There are 1.7 million…

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Swiss hacker succeeds in gaining access to US government’s no-fly list: Local media

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