TEWKSBURY – Last December Tewksbury Police confronted a new, and growing, frontier in cyberterrorism when the CryptoLocker ransomware virus infected the department’s network, encrypting essential department files until the town paid a $500 bitcoin ransom. In total, police systems were down between four and five days as the department worked with the FBI, Homeland Security, Massachusetts State Police, as well as private firms in an effort to restore their data without paying the ransom.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), CryptoLocker is a malware campaign that initially surfaced in 2013. CryptoLocker is a new variant of ransomware that restricts access to infected computers and demands the victim provide a payment to the attackers in order to decrypt and recover their files. As of this time, the primary means of infection appears to be through phishing emails containing malicious attachments, phony FedEx and UPS tracking notices, and even through pop-up ads.
Police Chief Timothy Sheehan told the Town Crier that Tewksbury was hit with a newer form of CryptoLocker, for which authorities did not have the key. Though initially infected sometime on December 7, the department became aware of the malware on December 8, 2014. Full Article here.
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