A state-funded cyber attack has led to the New York Law Department hack disrupting legal proceedings from Saturday last week. And sources confirm that the disruption was caused by file-encrypting malware i.e. ransomware and it might take some time for the department to pull back the operations to normalcy.
Since most of the records are digitalized; the attorneys are not in a position to retrieve data for knowledge. And authorities state that the backup and recovery process of information could take days or weeks under present circumstances.
Although the website remained unaffected by the cyber attack, most of the lawyers were unable to access data related to cases and hearings.
New York City Law Department’s entire network has been shut down to contain the spread of ransomware and there is still no clarity on whether the hackers managed to steal sensitive information during the incident.
FBI has been pressed into service to investigate the incident and sources claim that the attack could have been originated from foreign soil.
Various federal agencies in the United States have started to take appropriate measures to contain such Cybersecurity incidents before they go out of control.
Meanwhile, the White House has issued an alert to all American businesses to take urgent security steps to defend against ransomware attacks- probably launched by adversary nations like Russia and China.
Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI stated that ransomware threats have the potential to be treated as global terrorist threats such as the September 2001 attacks.