Who Got Hacked This Week? August 3 Edition

Ransomware Attack Shuts Down Town Infrastructure

A borough and a town in Alaska have been hit by a devastating ransomware attack, forcing employees to completely forego computers and go back to typewriters and hand receipts.

According to a report by Mat-Su borough’s IT Director Eric Wyatt, the attack was “multi-pronged, multi-vectored”, its components including the Emotet trojan horse, BitPaymer ransomware and an actual hacker logging into the borough’s network.

Some of the malware was dormant on the borough’s computers since as early as May 3, the report said, but the attack culminated on July 23, when the crypto locker portion of the malware started encrypting the drives of computers on the network. All in all, nearly all of the borough’s 500 workstations and 120 out of 150 servers were affected. According to the report, this was a zero-day attack, meaning that it used exploits that were never seen before.