A hacking attack aimed at infecting a Missouri county website with malware has been thwarted. Hackers deployed a trojan malware in an attempt to gain access to the St. Louis County website earlier this month. The county's IT team took the website offline on September 1 after multiple attacks were detected on the county's server
Newly appointed IT director Charles Henderson said Monday that hackers attempted, unsuccessfully, to take control of the Missouri county's website. He added that there is no indication that any data in the hacking attack.
The hackers mimicked the legitimate traffic in an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in the site's management system. According to Henderson, the hackers were able to bypass all but one of the county's cyber defenses. All that was left was a trojan to compromise the server, Henderson added.
In order to prevent the hackers from infiltrating this final defense level, Henderson's IT team chose to take the site offline and operate a new site that was under development, and under other conditions it would start operating in a few months.
Henderson said his IT team took the web server down for maintenance to “close” the vulnerability and restore the site. Henderson also noted that after he and his team reviewed the method of attack used by the hackers and the options available to them, they concluded that they could not protect the server from further attacks with only one layer of defense, so they recommended not restoring the system.
Additionally, businesses in Camden County, Missouri, were disrupted last April after a sophisticated encryption. Additionally, over 360,000 patients at St. Luke’s Hospital (SLF) in Kansas City, Missouri were affected by a recent ransomware attack on Blackbaud. According to a statement released by SLF in August, the hackers behind this ransomware attack removed a copy of the hospital’s backup file, intending to steal money from Blackbaud.
