A Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate that stole data from the Washington, D.C., police department says negotiations over payment have broken down, with it rejecting a $100,000 payment offer from the $4 million ransom demand and warned that they will release sensitive information that could put lives at risk if more money is not offered.
The ransomware gang that hacked Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department published extensive profiles of 22 officers Tuesday as part of an extortion attempt.
The files on current and former police officers are detailed and include personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, results of psychological assessments, copies of driver’s licenses, fingerprints, polygraph test results, as well as residential, financial and marriage history.
The Metropolitan Police Department profiles are each stored as a PDF for individual officers. Most are more than 100 pages long, and one is more than 300 pages.
The department, which previously said it was aware of a cyber incident, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ransomware gangs have been leaking sensitive data from victims for well over a year, but experts said they have not seen such aggressive new tactics used before against police departments.
The cybercriminal mafias mostly operate in foreign safe havens out of the reach of Western law enforcement.
The average ransom payments last year were $310,000, up 171% from 2019, according to Palo Alto Networks.
The Biden administration has said that curbing ransomware attacks are a top priority, saying they are a threat to national security.
I have a few questions.
1) In order for the Russian-speaking ransom syndicate to access these records and then copy them, it appears to be a lot of records, it would take a lot of time, and why didn’t anyone in their network security team see this traffic and stop the access?
In every system I have developed I store an IP address, IP tracking data and IP Location with the username and password that is accessing any of our systems. PDF documents in this case appear to be very large files in size and how is it nobody saw this traffic?
If you see an officer log in that has this access and an IP address in Russia or spoofed it might be a good idea to block that access right then. Or maybe this department moved to the Cloud to save money? Whatever happened the people responsible at this police department for this horrible disaster needs to be fired.
2) This police department was negotiating a payment with this Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate and could not agree on a price. It would appear the Washington DC police department is Insane?
Any sane person with good common sense would agree that this police department’s leadership needs to be removed immediately. We as a nation cannot have people that clearly should not be in technology, and in any leadership positions that actions are like this.
Sad year for America, but it will only get worse, a lot worse. I have worked and still work with many City, County, State and Federal government agencies. Over the years I have seen a huge destruction of good leadership in many of these agencies, not all of them, but a lot of them. City government leadership tends to be more vulnerable than other government leadership.
Looking back on it all, the whole egov and moving to the cloud was probably a bad idea in the long term.
It appears we as a nation are experiencing the hangover of the huge cloud party and defunding the IT department.
The question now is who will survive this hangover?
References:
Reference 1: apnews.com – police technology government and politics
Reference 2: nbcnews.com- hackers release personal info 22 dc police officers
Cyber Security is hard work!
Contact us today toll free 1-888-392-9623 to find out more on how Adept Technologies can save you money by utilizing our services and software technology.
