The University of California pays $1 million in crypto following ransomware attack

• The University of California San Francisco School of medicine has allegedly paid more than $1 million in ransom to hackers behind a ransomware attack at the start of June. 
• According to a local news outlet, the IT staff initially detected the security incident and said that the attack was launched by NetWalker group which had a massive impact but only on a limited number of servers in the School of medicine. 

The University of California in San Francisco School of medicine has allegedly paid more than $1 million in ransom to hackers behind a ransomware attack at the start of June. According to a local news outlet, the IT staff initially detected the security incident and said that the attack was launched by NetWalker group which had a massive impact but only on a limited number of servers in the School of medicine. 

The School of medicine allegedly has paid the ransom in cryptocurrency. Even though there were many areas which were isolated by experts from the internal network, hackers were seemingly able to access and deploy the run somewhere software successfully. 

The University of California has said the following on the matter:

“The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good. [...] We, therefore, made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained.”

It seems that ransomware attacks such as this one are more prevalent than ever. One expert on these kinds of attacks, Brett Callow has said the following on these incidents.

“While public and private sector entities in the U.S., Europe and Australasia are the most common targets for ransomware groups, entities in other countries are frequently targeted too. And as ransomware attacks are now data breaches, the risks associated with these incidents are greater than ever — both to the targeted organizations and to their customers and business partners.”

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!