Charlotte, North Carolina office servers being held for ransom by unknown hacker (Want 2 Bitcoins!)

Less than half of the article...

“County Manager Dena Diorio said the hacker is asking for two bitcoins, which amounts to about $23,000 dollars, by 1 p.m. Wednesday. The county is reportedly considering whether to pay the hacker. As of Tuesday evening, the hacker's identity and location were unknown.

“It’s not that it’s personal information, but it’s information we need to do our business,” County Manager Dena Diorio said of the information breached, Tuesday night.

Diorio said no resident’s personal information is exposed, but all of the Information Technology Services (ITS) systems in the county are shut down. The outage will reportedly affect email, printing, and other ways to conduct business at most county offices.

“Things that we were doing electronically, we are now moving to paper,” Diorio said.”

This is the Charlotte, North Carolina, and it brings business in one of the largest banking areas to a halt.

My theory is a ddos,using a wifi hotspot and a local employee.as this happened a few days after something went down with youtube and a ddos.

Interesting.

this happened to my doctors office in Matthews, NC just about 3 months ago.
they didn't pay the ransom, instead they had a company come in and retrieve all their records and they went to Macs.

insurance is covering the incident.

Last Edited by Agent 99 on 12/06/2017 05:07 AM

Wow! Matthews is in Mecklenburg County. I wonder how this will turn out.

same red screen'd phishing crap as always
NOTHING NEW

Thanks. I have no idea how this stuff works. I just know that Family was sent home from work yesterday, and it’s a bad time to not be working.

I don't know that it would be feasible to switch all the 3rd party applications (financials, erp, gis, etc) the county ho run on a Mac. Linux might be a better option. Most enterprise apps now have a linux version, unless they're from Micro$oft. This would a great time/reason to finally ditch sharepoint and outlook :)