You may have been hearing more lately about ransomware attacks and the impact they’re having on critical infrastructure nationwide.
An oil pipeline, meat packing company and ferry service all fell victim recently to a ransomware attack.
The latest major ransomware attack in the United States took aim at the meat supply.
Ransomware involves hackers taking over a computer system and then holding it for some kind of ransom, typically internet currency.
“They don’t necessarily want to do damage to the infrastructure, but they know when the infrastructure is critical, you don’t have the option to just ignore these people. You either have to deal with them or turn over to some backup system,” said Dr. Steve Bucci, a former top Pentagon Official.
And by attacking critical infrastructure, hackers are more likely to get paid.
State police say it’s usually simple steps that can prevent a serious attack.
“The basic steps are beforehand, individuals and organizations should have good backups of all their data, so if it’s encrypted, you can restore from it and not have to worry about paying a ransom, and the other aspect of that is someone else has your data and what are they going to do with that data,” said D/Sgt. Jeff Hoffman with the MSP Michigan Cyber Command Center.
But it’s likely these attacks will become more common, and catching and prosecuting the people behind them, isn’t easy.
“The government is very restricted in what it can do, or what it feels comfortable doing, and the owners in most cases don’t have any sort of retaliatory option. It’s very difficult and scary because I think you’re going to see this happen more and more often as the bad guys figure out, this is a really lucrative thing to with frankly very low downside as far as getting caught, or going to jail or anything like that,” said Bucci.
To report any sort of ransomware attack, contact or call 877-MI-CYBER.
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