Hell of a virus…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-38857488

Let’s hope they get some advice on off site backups as well as anti-virus.

They’ll finish scanning it all and the town hall will burn down…

There’s so much wrong there it’s hard to know where to begin.

I thought you’d like it 🙂

I’d begin by needing a licence to operate a computer

There’s so much wrong there it’s hard to know where to begin.

Tiverton in general or just this story?

“The council is now looking into computer security measures.”
erm…

Quite.

Backups.
User education.
Backups.
Spam filtering.
Backups.
Anti-virus.
Backups.
If the computer “actually started to shake” I’m a 4′ paraplegic Latvian postman.
Have I mentioned backups yet?

Tiverton IT support department have now found their recovery disk.

Yeah, I was about to start, but then realised what they’re doing right would be a shorter list. Here it is:

So do we think its total incompetence, or has someone got some clinton emails to get rid of?

Oh, and,

You can block this sort of attack fairly trivially by removing execute rights from temporary directories.

Aye, I’d be thinking some one’s trying to hide something there.

If the computer “actually started to shake” I’m a 4′ paraplegic Latvian postman.

Quite. Only thing I can think is that the the encryption process caused the CPU fans or DVD drive to spin up causing a fairly loud noise. ❓ Bit of a leap to it shaking though 😆

I bet they still have an IT chap who gets paid a nice fat salary…

Sounds like demonic possession rather than a virus.

5.25″ floppy discs, green screens, dot matrix printers… whats not to like?
Govt IT at the cutting edge of a blunt thing.

The computer started shaking ? Well at keast that confirms the staff quality.

Also he said deleting all the data files was the worst thing he’d seen in 15 years at the council. Personally I doubt it.

Just stupidity here, it is in Devon, after all…
Actually, that’s a wee bit harsh, I love Devon, but even hospitals have been hit by these ransomware viruses, it’s basically total lack of awareness about not opening anything that smells fishy, and having up-to-date security, something a bit more sophisticated than Norton…

5.25″ floppy discs

You may laugh, but I worked for a while in an on-site studio at a major cardboard packaging manufacturers, and they moved files around on floppies!
This was around twelve years ago.

it’s basically total lack of awareness about not opening anything that smells fishy

Or stupidity.
I had weekly issues with our old (72 yr old…) secretary who could not understand that all the emails in our info@ email address were not always from nice people who were trying to help. We did have up to date, cloud-hosted systems that were really robust, but her ability to *always* click on *all* attachments on *all* emails (multiple times, just in case) tested the security to it’s limits… I would weekly sit with her and go through the emails – pointing out iffy spelling, dodgy graphics, odd email addresses, spoof URLs etc, and showed how to right click and ‘scan for virus’ etc – still she blithely multi-clicked away or even tried to save to desktop if it wouldn’t open…

🙄

Sounds like an episode of Mr Robot

for similar reasons, particular email recipients at our place have all attachments stripped off their emails automatically. its just easier that way…

Let’s face it here nobody is actually shocked are they!

My recent it help included sorting out some bodies wireless mouse (mostly opening the hatch on the back to pull the receiver out) amazingly just taking it out the box and putting it next to the laptop didn’t connect it.

On the flip side a mate did a coding weekend comp thing, every team had a hosted server to use, the sponsor who was doing the hosting specialised on online hosting just cloned the boxes giving all the teams the same security details so anyone could get in to all the servers.

Well if you don’t change the default password…

[quoteWell if you don’t change the default password[/quote]

Thats it,
Devon County Council secure log in details

Admin
Password

Tiverton council urgently requires a windows ME recovery disk.

This sounds like a very sensible thing to implement. Does it work on a windows PC and if so is it reasonably easy to set up? Have tried a quick Google but nothing obvious came up (plenty of info on how to reinstate them but not how to remove them 🙂 )

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptolocker-ransomware-information#manual

or

https://www.foolishit.com/cryptoprevent-malware-prevention/

In a corporate environment you can do much the same as the first link via Group Policy.