Ransomware attack: Alaska town returns to typewriters for a week

That’s what government workers did in tow municipalities in Alaska last week on 24 July 2018.

“Without computers and files, Borough employees acted resourcefully. They re-enlisted typewriters from closets and wrote by hand receipts and lists of library book patrons and landfill fees at some of the 73 different buildings.” – said the director of public affairs at Mat-Su.

The attack was so sophisticated that employees had to do their day to day job using typewriters and hand written receipts.

Some reports advise that this attack was with a intent of a zero-day attack that utilized new exploits. The targetted infrastracture was everything from servers and email exchanges to computer systems and telephones.

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According to researchers the StalinLocker will take control over the screen with a full background portrait of Stalin and Soviet Union anthem as background music. StalinLocker.

Kiss your data goodbye [ do svidaniya ] with StalinLocker ransomware

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Many of the hacks happened in the late 2017, signifying that these trends may continue into the New Year, as hackers are essentially human and “old habits die hard. In the meantime, some hackers may modify their methods for system breach for new challenges.

Therefore, the Hackwarenews team has conveniently made a top three “to-do lists” and make sure this list entered into your New Year resolutions.

Fix the micro-processers first

Just after the countdown party, the world’s second largest chipmaker, Intel stunned the world citing its flagships product, the Pentium processers are vulnerable to hack by data-theft bugs such as Meltdown and Spectre.

To be fair, Intel is not alone, as its system is susceptible to Meltdown, other chip designs used in smartphones like Advanced Micro Devices and ARM Holdings fall prey to Spectre. Both Meltdown and Spectre give hackers access to the entire memory contents of computers and later these information can be used for mounting new attacks.

Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel then announced over the annual trade show, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Tuesday, 9 Jan 2018, that the company will patch up 90% of the processors made over the past 5 years by the end of this week. The remaining 10% will be secured by the end of January 2018.

Beware of QR codes

Many countries are pushing for cashless society, thank to wide-spread use of online shopping popularized by Amazon and Alibaba. More often now, consumers did not need to bring their wallet, full of physical money notes for shopping on malls and outlet stores – all these can be replaced by a swipe or scan from your personal cellphone.

Some shopping outlets even have promotional QR code for consumers to scan and receive discounts. So whenever there is money, thieves will follow, seeking to siphon credits out of unsuspecting eyes.

Behind these QR codes, there might be some embedded code with malicious content that introduced Trojans and viruses to consumers that eventually steal personal information and so on.

Apparently, the QR code scam is rife in China, according to South China Morning Post, with a significant amount of cash siphoned from consumer pockets unknowingly. To protect yourself, you can be prudent to follow some of steps mentioned at scambusters.org.

Don’t be kidnapped by ransomware

Kidnapping has evolved over the physical realm and now it has gone viral. If you own a business, have an office and making profitable returns over the quarters, then you are exposed to such risk.

Just like any classic kidnapping cases, the hackers will block access of computer system from legit users until a ransom is paid. Apparently, such attacks were on the rise in 2017, thanks to the popularity of the infamous WannaCry ransomware.

Into the New Year, with the toughening of cyber-security among the corporate firms, there is a trend that hackers turning to personal devices like cellphones where users stored personal information on credit card or online shopping credit accounts.

Readers can follow this link on the FBI tips on dealing with ransomware threat. However, the site lacks of suggestions on personal protections over ransomware, but the same principles do apply. So for the rest of 2018, be prudent, street-wise and hope for the best!

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The reasons for hacking vary depending on who or what group are doing the hack and for the goal, they are doing it for. By far the biggest reason that these people hack is to make money. This would definitely go long ways in explaining the explosive growth in the use of a very targeted hack and specialized software called ransomware. This malware is extremely dangerous and can literally hold a business or individual’s computer data hostage.

What is ransomware?

All malicious software falls under a category of software called malware and when this malware is introduced into a computer it buries itself into the computer’s registry or file system and waits to be activated. Once it becomes active it locks the user out of their data files by encrypting the data and requiring a specific key that only the hacker knows.

This type of malware gets its name from the fact that the hackers are demanding a ransom be paid or else they will never give up the key and the data will permanently be locked. This has caused a number of businesses to make a difficult decision between paying the money and hope that they will be given the actual unlock key in exchange for a certain amount of money.

Do you have to pay to get your data back?

This particular hack is incredibly sophisticated and it involves the exploiting of the ransomware that was delivered worldwide and infected computers globally in more than 150 countries worldwide. Then all a hacker had to do was identify targets by using a phishing technique and gained access to the target computer or network. Once inside they were able to encrypt the specific data files and locked the user out of the data.

The next step was to contact the user or business and demand payment or risk permanently losing access to the data by refusing to pay the money. However, there truly is no guaranty that even if you pay the money that you will get the key that will unlock your files.

There is something that you can do to mitigate the damage caused to the ransomware before the attack even occurs. If you are currently using a robust backup solution, you would not be in danger of totally losing access to your data. Depending on your backup solution you would be able to restore any of the files that were encrypted from your backup.

Once you have ascertained that you have all of your files intact, you can use one of many tools that are available online for removing the ransomware from any and all computers on your company network or your own home PC. With all that done, it would be wise to re-evaluate your company’s policies regarding computer security and safety to ensure that you have a way to prevent the malware from even getting onto your computer.

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