Information Security

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This article talks about Russian nationals who have been found to be conducting ransomware attacks on businesses and the United states government, one of these individuals being Yevgeniy Polyanin. The deputy attorney general stated in a message to any cyber criminals "if you target victims here, we will target you". These criminals would leave electronic notes in the form of a text file so when the victim would open it they could no longer have access to their own files unless they paid the ransom and would then be given a code to access files. A way this would have been avoided would be more cautious when opening unknown files and maybe even having some type of software that can detect dangerous malware or suspicious activity.

Earlier this year gas prices spiked and many people started hoarding gas in the most absurd ways on the East coast, this is because of the colonial gas company ransomware attack in May. They ended up paying about 4.4 million dollars in bitcoin to these hackers. Although this was a crazy attack that no one expected it could have been avoided by having more multi factor authorization since apparently they only had one layer of protection. Maybe now in the future this will not occur if they have put up more multi point authorization when it comes to passwords. Fortunately they did end up getting some of the ransom they paid back using a private key.