The attacks have been grabbing headlines over the past year for shutting down
IT services at city governments, schools, and health providers. The City of New
Orleans recently reported getting hit with a possible ransomware attack that’s
prompted the city to order a shutdown of municipal IT systems.
Emsisoft pulled from press reports and the company’s data to count how many
victims have been hit. In short, the situation is bad. In addition to government
agencies, 86 universities, colleges, and school districts were hit by US-based
ransomware attacks this year. During the same period, 759 healthcare providers
in the country were also victimized in the assaults.
The scale of the attacks indicates the hackers may have caused billions in
damages. That’s because it can cost an organization thousands to millions of
dollars to recover from a ransomware incident, Emsisoft said in the report.
“Given that ransomware attacks against governments, healthcare providers and
educational institutions have indeed been proven to work, these sectors are
likely to continue to be heavily targeted in 2020,” the company went on to warn.
Governments, schools, and health providers are notorious for spending little on
IT security because of their limited budgets. As a result, their computer systems
can become easy targets for hackers. The intrusions can occur over an
unpatched vulnerability in a remote login system, for example. Or the hacker
will trick an employee into opening an email attachment that contains malware.
Antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab has also been tracking the ransomware
attacks and has found that they can end up demanding between $5,000 to as
much as $5 million from victims when they target a municipal organization.
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION (^) I SUBSCRIBE (^) I JANUARY 2020