Actually, that falls under Department of Homeland Security. In one professional continuing education course that we were REQUIRED to take, the presenter (a IT security expert) found out that a Georgia municipality had lax online security. He was able to get into their system and access the control for their municipal water supply. He actually contacted them, told them they had a security issue and offered to help them fix it. They blew him off and he dropped a dime on them. He contacted DHS and they paid the municipal water department a visit.Darryl wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 10:41 am What we need to do is ....
Do a much better job of protecting our infrastructure from Hackers and virus'. It's not that hard!
These business need to decide ... Do they really need to be ONLINE? If not, then get the Hell offline.
That is 99% of the way these idiots get to you.
If they have to be online, than they should be required by law to have enough security to keep these idiots out.
It's not that hard but, there is a cost money wise and that is what stops these business'. They don't want to pay this cost, so they take stupid chances. The government needs to ID these business' and force them to protect their assets.
Honestly, it's not that hard but it is a constant battle to keep them out. I know, I did this for the company I worked with for 24 years. Paying a "ransom is a red flag to me that they did a poor job of doing "backups". We had so many backups that if they did get through to us, we could just delete everything and reboot to a fresh copy of the backup and you could be back up again. Yes, it would have taken maybe 2 hours to do that, but that would be much better then paying a ransom or being offline for days on end. If I hade done this at work, I would have been fired. That needs to happen.
Paying a ransom:
This is a huge mistake. Because most of these ransomware includes a "backdoor" built into it. If you pay the ransom, there is no guarantee that they will not use that back door and do it to you again. Your only recourse if you pay ransom is to quickly try to ID the back door and remove it. It's really not very easy. And, there could be multiple back doors. So, where do they stand now. At best, they are back up BUT ....
Paying ransom is not something you should have to be doing .... EVER.
Problem is, you have some "old school" business men that still can't see the value of a proper IT department, and pay for it. If there is a possibility of impacting the public like this, then they should be "required" to do it. I hate forcing business to do things, but sometime it is necessary.
Darryl
I can't speak for other court systems, but in Arizona our Supreme Court takes Information Technology security very seriously. We are required to take an annual computer and information security course and our IT department is constantly monitoring the system for online threats. That is more critical than ever, as we now permit attorneys and parties to submit pleadings via two different electronic filing systems. We have to make certain that the parties can use the systems to file, but make certain that viruses are not imported from outside computers to our computers.