You had backed up your system, no?
The virus infected the town hall IT system this week when an email arrived in the its main inbox claiming to be from a parcel delivery firm.
It explained that parcel needed to be collected and that the URL link supplied would lead to a page containing details on how to retrieve it.Around five minutes later that it became clear a virus disguised in the email had infected every single one of the council’s computers.
Mr Vanderwolfe sad it was ‘fairly apparent’ the email was suspicious when he received it but that he was ‘in a rush’ to get on.
He said: ‘Sometimes when you are in a rush and busy, you can slip up.
‘This virus was horrible and now all of the documents are encrypted. It then asks for £3,000 in exchange for the file to be unlocked.
‘But even then there is no guarantee they would do it. We have had an IT expert in to have a look but he is unsure on how to fix it.
Oops! Of course, if you have your system backed up, you wipe the lot and restore.
The documents are expected to take some months to re-scan and upload onto the system.
I’m all for offline backups but that’s a bit extreme…
Err… I was automatically deleting emails claiming to be from delivery firms and which contained attachments and/or links more than ten years ago. I really would have thought that any organisation’s IT depot would have hammered this into the DFU’s by now.
@Ted Treen
+1
The UPS/Fedex scams are as old as Bank & 419 scams and regulatly reported in MSM.
No excuse for council lackey, he should be fired for gross misconduct.
This particular organisation’s ‘IT Department’ probably spent more time whinging that IT nomenclature was racist.
Fucking Hellski!
“The documents are expected to take some months to re-scan and upload onto the system.”
Errr … I thought that that method was the one favoured by Hillary Clinton …
I’m assuming, from the wording of the article, that if they did have backups they were on a drive connected to the system. That’s another no-no.
We had one of those and I spotted it just as it started encrypting files on the network. I mentioned it to an IT guy and he advised me to log an IT request.
I had to explain to him that he might want to move things a bit quicker than that
And did they?
Yes. Stopped it, cleaned it and backed up the affected files. Once they realised what was happening
Restored, not backed up