Police officers in Maine, USA, acquired malware and had to pay a ransom to the crooks to decrypt important files on their systems that had been affected by ransomware.
Four city police departments and a sheriff's office in Lincoln County used a shared computer network, on which they hosted administrative files.
Then, one day the entire system was encrypted by the ransomware Megacode, which demands Bitcoins for decryption.
This type of malware scans computers and networks for documents, generates a random encryption key per file, and uses it to encrypt the data. It then encrypts the keys using two keys (one public and one private). Only the crooks have the private key needed to decrypt the documents, and that comes at a cost. Victims have a few days to pay the ransom or the private key is deleted forever.
When Maine police tried unsuccessfully to restore the encrypted files, they decided to pay the $300 ransom in Bitcoins.
“We paid the ransom,” Sheriff Todd Brackett told the Register. “We tried to find a way not to do it, but in the end our IT team recommended we pay the ransom.”
The infection began when someone using the police department’s network ran an executable that they had downloaded from the Internet via a link in an email. The malware then installed itself and spread to the main server. It then began encrypting all the data it could find.
The usual way to deal with ransomware is to perform a full disk wipe followed by an offline backup. In this case, however, the backup system did not work properly, so the police had no choice but to pay the crooks.
Source: secnews.gr
