"The current Information Security Management System (ISMS), however, has gaps that would prevent it from passing a certification audit, including. certification project in 2015," the report notes. "Atlanta Information Management (AIM) and the Office of Information Security have strengthened information security since beginning the.
Though Atlanta won't comment on the details of the current ransomware attack, a City Auditor's Office report from January 2018 shows that the City recently failed a security compliance assessment. "The DoublePulsar results definitely point to poor cybersecurity hygiene on the part of the City and suggest this is an ongoing problem, not a one time thing." EternalBlue and DoublePulsar infiltrate systems using the same types of publicly accessible exposures that SamSam looks for, an indication, Williams says, that Atlanta didn't have its government networks locked down.
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Rendition InfoSec's Williams published evidence on Tuesday that the City also suffered a cyberattack in April 2017, which exploited the EternalBlue Windows network file sharing vulnerability to infect the system with the backdoor known as DoublePulsar-used for loading malware onto a network. The City of Atlanta seems to have struggled in that area. 'Not to be harsh, but looking at this their security strategy must be pretty bad.' And SamSam has been adapted to exploit a variety of vulnerabilities in remote desktop protocols, Java-based web servers, File Transfer Protocol servers, and other public network components. This way, the attack doesn't need to rely on trickery and social engineering to infect victims.
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Unlike many ransomware variants that spread through phishing or online scams and require an individual to inadvertently run a malicious program on a PC (which can then start a chain reaction across a network), SamSam infiltrates by exploiting vulnerabilities or guessing weak passwords in a target's public-facing systems, and then uses mechanisms like the popular Mimikatz password discovery tool to start to gain control of a network. 'The most interesting thing about SamSam isn't the malware, it's the attackers.'įirst identified in 2015, SamSam's advantages are conceptual as well as technical, and hackers make hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars a year by launching SamSam attacks.
The specific malware and attackers-combined with what analysts see as lack of preparedness, based on the extent of the downtime-explain why the Atlanta infection has been so debilitating. While dozens of serviceable ransomware programs circulate at any given time, SamSam and the attackers who deploy it are particularly known for clever, high-yield approaches. "It’s important to understand that our overall operations have been significantly impacted and it will take some time to work through and rebuild our systems and infrastructure," a spokesperson for the City of Atlanta said in a statement on Thursday.Ītlanta faces a tough opponent in cleaning up this mess. It's been a devastating barrage-all caused by a standard, but notoriously effective strain of ransomware called SamSam. The attack has had far-reaching impacts-crippling the court system, keeping residents from paying their water bills, limiting vital communications like sewer infrastructure requests, and pushing the Atlanta Police Department to file paper reports for days. For over a week, the City of Atlanta has battled a ransomware attack that has caused serious digital disruptions in five of the city's 13 local government departments.
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