Recommended Reading

There’s a terrifying new strain of ransomware circulating about that is able to render its targets effectively dead in the water.

ArsTechnia reports on this alarming new trend:

”Over the past five years, ransomware has emerged as a vexing menace that has shut down factories, hospitals, and local municipalities and school districts around the world. In recent months, researchers have caught ransomware doing something that’s potentially more sinister: intentionally tampering with industrial control systems that dams, electric grids, and gas refineries rely on to keep equipment running safely.

A ransomware strain discovered last month and dubbed Ekans contains the usual routines for disabling data backups and mass-encrypting files on infected systems. But researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that actively seeks out and forcibly stops applications used in industrial control systems, which is usually abbreviated as ICS. Before starting file-encryption operations, the ransomware kills processes listed by process name in a hard-coded list within the encoded strings of the malware.”

Yes.  You read that correctly.  New hacker technology that can shut down infrastructure for refineries, hospitals, power grids, and other critical infrastructure.

With how quickly these criminals are advancing in their technological capabilities, businesses, municipalities, schools, and nonprofits all need to beef up their cyber security systems to try to stay one step ahead of the game.  This isn’t just an inconvenience of lost time anymore.  This is a very dangerous position to face.

Read the entire article from ArsTechnia here, and contact ParJenn Information Systems for more information and to schedule a free system security assessment.