The Hacking Threat Rises

source:  CNN.com  | image: pexels.com

At The New Yorker last month, Sam Knight detailed the devastating consequences of a ransomware attack on the British Library in London: “The outage became an incident. The National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of G.C.H.Q., the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, got involved. On November 20th, a hacking group called Rhysida—after a genus of centipedes—offered 490,191 files stolen from the British Library for sale on the dark Web. United States cybersecurity officials describe Rhysida as a ‘ransomware-as-a-service’ provider—a gun for hire—part of an increasingly professional array of cyber-extortion organizations.” Knight also noted the widely international array of apparent victims of this group: “Since Rhysida surfaced, in May, its victims have included the Chilean Army, a medical-research lab in Australia, and Prospect Medical Holdings, a health-care company with hospitals in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and California. There are reports that its code contains fragments of Russian, and it appears not to have struck inside Russia or its close allies.”

The Economist takes the incident as evidence that ransomware attacks are a growing threat to “countries, not just companies,” writing: “Ransomware has been mainly a Western problem but it is spreading globally. America, Australia, Britain, Canada and Germany are the most affected countries, but Brazil and India are not far behind them. Victims span the public and private sectors—in recent weeks attacks have hit an Italian cloud-service provider that hosts government data, Germany’s energy agency and a Chinese bank in New York, among others.”At The New Yorker last month, Sam Knight detailed the devastating consequences of a ransomware attack on the British Library in London: “The outage became an incident. The National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of G.C.H.Q., the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, got involved. On November 20th, a hacking group called Rhysida—after a genus of centipedes—offered 490,191 files stolen from the British Library for sale on the dark Web. United States cybersecurity officials describe Rhysida as a ‘ransomware-as-a-service’ provider—a gun for hire—part of an increasingly professional array of cyber-extortion organizations.” Knight also noted the widely international array of apparent victims of this group: “Since Rhysida surfaced, in May, its victims have included the Chilean Army, a medical-research lab in Australia, and Prospect Medical Holdings, a health-care company with hospitals in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and California. There are reports that its code contains fragments of Russian, and it appears not to have struck inside Russia or its close allies.”