Ransomware

How Local and Regional Authorities can improve their ransomware defenses

A recent study done by the National Association of State CIOs (NASCiO) and Deloitte found in the US 75% of state CISOs view ransomware as a threat. As this Govloop report reported “…there’s good reason for that. A number of factos, the report notes that combine to make local and regional governments particularly vulnerable to this attack”.

• High impact: Ransomeware is capable of causing an organization’s operations to a halt. As an attack it is one of the most likely facing local and regional organizations.
• Easy entry: With commercialization of attacks using “Ransomware-as-a-Service”, even non-technical threat actors are able to profit easily from ransomware operations
• Emergence of distributors: Malware families tend to be, the Govloop article points out, prolific information stealers are linked to various ransomware operators.

Clearly local and regional organizations need to revamp their strategies to deal with these challenges:

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A great base scenario for CS-AWARE-NEXT?

Don’t remember if have heard of this incident before, but this could actually be a great base scenario for CS-AWARE-NEXT. It is about the May 2021 ransomware attack on the Health Service Executive (HSE).

At the end of the year 2021, a report was published, that had been commissioned by the Health Services Executive (“HSE”). The report counts about 100 pages – so it is not what one might regard as a convenient reading for an evening discussion. However, there are many generic cybersecurity issues that the report raises that are to be addressed in the CS-AWARE-NEXT project

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Another attack…

Last week, another attack against the UK’s National Health Service: this time the target was the NHS 111, a hot line helps people get the right advice and treatment when they urgently need it. So it is not about cinema ticket reservations or something else that one would consider as less important, less critical or less urgent.

You can read about this here and here. So it is nothing new at all – same attacks took place last May in Carinthia in Austria. You can also read about this here as well.

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