This University Was Forced To Pay Rs 8.5 Crore To Hackers After Ransomware Attack

The University of California, San Francisco was allegedly attacked by a group of hackers, as detected on June 1.

It had to pay a fat sum of $1.14 million to the criminal hackers, in order to resolve the ransomware attack, as the researchers in the UCSF are enrolled in the leading American antibody testing and clinical trials, for generation of a possible coronavirus treatment.

UCSF Ransomware Attack

On June 1, a group of hackers, with a history of attacking health care organisations, conducted a successful ransomware attack on the University of California, San Francisco.

The hackers encrypted data on the university’s servers. Despite confirming the illegal intrusion, the university authorities have not provided any information of the section of its IT network that has been compromised, as a result of the intrusion.

Post the attack, the university alerted its security experts and law enforcement.

As mentioned above, the researchers at the university were conducting testings and trials for coming up with a cure for the coronavirus treatments.

The university confirmed the security experts and law enforcements that the attack didn’t hamper any of its patient care operations.

Hackers: Netwalker

The university authorities stated that they are conducting a thorough assessment of the incident and in order to preserve the integrity of the investigation, they cannot reveal too many information.

The hackers known as Netwalker claimed to have taken credit for the conducted attack, sharing information of the same on their dark web blog.

They posted 4 screenshots of their successful breach in the UCSF’s network, on their blog, which contained acronyms that referenced the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which is central to the department of the university conducting the Covid treatments trials.

Uni Pays $1.14 Mill to the Hackers

The university authorities informed that since the data that was encrypted was important to some of the academic work they pursued, they decided on paying some portion of the ransom.

The hackers were paid a sum of $1.14 million to resolve their attack.

Once the payment was made, the university received a key to restore access to the files and copies of the stolen documents.