Town of Tewksbury Mass Pays to get rid of Ransomware Infection.

Town of Tewksbury MA Pays to get rid of Ransomware Infection.

Here we go again.

Looks like the Tewksbury Police department got hit by a variant of Cryptolocker which locked them out of very important Police Department information.

The Police Department paid the $500.00 to unencrypt and release the files.

The breach occurred in December 2014 according to the Chief of Police and they were locked out of files for about five days severely hampering their ability to operate.  Even involvement by the FBI, Homeland Security, Massachusetts State Police and private firms, to fix the issue did not work.

They would have just used a data backup to fix the issue but since the most recent Backup was 18 months old they were stuck.

$500.00 is not a large amount of money but when you consider the fact that this type of hack has occurred to an estimated 1 million computers it adds up really fast.

The moral of the story is:

1. Create policies that define what employees can and can’t do on the web while at work.
2. Get an Internal and External Cyber Security Risk Assessment done.
3. Train employees on Cyber Security issues.
4. Periodically backup your data.
5. Repeat the Cyber Security program over and over again.

Unfortunately if you don’t have a defined Cyber Security program breaches can and will occur.