A US courthouse has been hit by ransomware, with the hackers behind it leaking documents they claim to have stolen online. Specifically, the hackers said they successfully carried out their attack, which targeted the Fourth District Court in Louisiana.
Hackers have infected a US courthouse with a ransomware strain, known as Conti, which was first detected in December 2019 and has been increasingly observed in recent months, targeting companies as well as public sector entities. It spreads across networks, using a series of techniques to obtain domain admin credentials. Once it has the necessary privileges, it deploys the ransomware to encrypt devices on the target network. In addition, researchers have observed that the malware uses the same ransom note developed by the Ryuk, while similarities in code.
The hacking group, in an effort to prove they were behind the attack, posted the documents they said were stolen on the dark web . They include verdicts for second-degree kidnapping, an armed robbery, and a case of aggravated rape. Other documents appear to relate to a jury hearing.
The official website for the Fourth District Court of Louisiana, 4jdc.com, has been taken offline. The court covers Ouachita County and Morehouse Parish and is one of 42 judicial districts in the state. It handles civil, criminal, and juvenile cases, which are typically heard in Monroe and Bastrop. However, the amount of ransom the hackers are demanding from their victim remains unknown.
It’s worth noting that ransomware attacks are not an unprecedented phenomenon for the Pelican State. In December of last year, one such attack was carried out against Baton Rouge. The security incident occurred just two days before a commencement ceremony scheduled for the college. In addition, a month earlier, a major ransomware attack on Louisiana’s state IT infrastructure disrupted the operation of many services, including government sites, email , and internal applications. Also, in July 2019, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency after ransomware attacks affected IT systems in three school districts.
According to Hank Schless, senior director at Lookout , this series of ransomware attacks suggests that every organization has valuable data that hackers can extract and then use as a “weapon” to threaten victims that if they don’t pay the required ransom , their businesses will likely suffer irreparable damage and be “paralyzed.” Schless also believes that an advanced hacking group like the one that developed the Conti ransomware likely used social engineering to convince a targeted employee to download a document or file to their device, which is how the attack began.
