News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Hartford Public Schools delay reopening amid ransomware attack

https://www.cyberscoop.com/hartford-rans...ronin-fbi/
Well, hackers aren't education friendly at all. They've attacked several schools and universities like those located Hartford, Connecticut.

Officials in Hartford, Conn., are dealing with another, unexpected challenge now that a ransomware attack has forced the city’s public schools to postpone classes.
The file-locking malware “caused an outage of critical systems and the restoration of those systems [is] not complete,” Hartford Public School officials said in a statement. “This includes the system that communicates our transportation routes to our bus company and it is preventing our ability to operate schools on Tuesday.”
An incident in April shut down computer servers at a community college in Illinois. In June, the University of California, San Francisco paid hackers more than $1 million to retrieve the university’s stolen data, Bloomberg News reported.
With more than 18,000 students, from pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade, Hartford is one of the largest public school systems in Connecticut.

How the government is keeping hackers from disrupting coronavirus vaccine research

https://www.cyberscoop.com/operation-war...a-fbi-hhs/

Known as the Security and Assurance portion of Operation Warp Speed, the mission is no small effort. Consisting of people from DDS, NSA, FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, it has been running behind the scenes for months.

The effort’s main goal is to provide cybersecurity advice, guidance, and services to pharmaceutical giants developing a vaccine or working on manufacturing and distribution, as well as government agencies participating in OWS, multiple U.S. government officials involved in the operation told CyberScoop.

The mission has been tested already, as hackers attached to foreign governments have targeted the U.S. vaccine effort. In recent months, the NSA has detected Russian intelligence hackers targeting coronavirus vaccine research in the U.S. Chinese government hackers have also been targeting American entities working on a vaccine with the intent of conducting intellectual property theft. In July, the Department of Justice also charged two men for working with Chinese intelligence agencies on efforts to compromise COVID-19 vaccine research.

The program’s primary concern, for now, is hackers motivated to manipulate, delete, or steal vaccine trial data, Brett Goldstein, the Director of DDS

the operation also includes scanning participating companies’ internet-connected devices, sharing notifications and technical indicators on potential nation-state threats, as well as providing assistance following security incidents.

They tell us that Moderna, one of the companies producing a vaccine candidate that reached phase 3 trials already, has been targeted by Chinese hackers!