According to this worrying article from Computing the NHS 111 service is reverting to pen and paper in order to continue to operate after the Adastra system was affected by a cyber attack. It hasn’t been confirmed if this was due to a crypto virus infection but it does seem likely that this will be the cause.
Louisiana declares emergency over cyberattacks targeting schools
Things seem to be going pretty badly for a lot of small states in America at the moment. As a regular listener to Security Now it seems there aren’t many weeks that go by at the moment where one state or another isn’t being crippled by ransomware. As they have discussed there is money to be made and it seems some governers are paying the ransom rather than trying to recover manually.
The rise in the prevelance of Ransomware hasn’t really impacted on Mac Users as it has with the Windows community so far… Of course the Mac has benefited from a secure design and being a smaller (relatively) target over the years, but with the growth in use of OS X and the maturity of the tools used by unscrupulous elements this security by obscurity can no longer be guaranteed.
When the official downloadable version of the popular BitTorrent client, Transmission, was infected with a Ransomware client ( KeRanger) in March year it seemed that the reality had come home to roost.
Just this afternoon I was involved in a discussion about how hackers exploit the most difficult to find holes in operating systems, networks and hardware to gain a way in or in some cases out of the protections wrapped around our technology by the people who developed them.
These protections are increasingly complex and sophisticated but as this article from Ars Technica shows the bad guys ( or good guys if they are doing this to expose weaknesses to the vendors rather than using for personal gain ) continue to find ways around and through the barriers.
