Ransomware criminals are dumping kids’ private files online after school hacks

July 5, 2023August 30, 2023Frank Articles cybersecurity, hack and leak, k-12 ransomware, ransomware

BY FRANK BAJAK, HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH AND LARRY FENN

July 5, 2023

The confidential documents stolen from schools and dumped online by ransomware gangs are raw, intimate and graphic. They describe student sexual assaults, psychiatric hospitalizations, abusive parents, truancy — even suicide attempts.

“Please do something,” begged a student in one leaked file, recalling the trauma of continually bumping into an ex-abuser at a school in Minneapolis. Other victims talked about wetting the bed or crying themselves to sleep.

Complete sexual assault case folios containing these details were among more than 300,000 files dumped online in March after the 36,000-student Minneapolis Public Schools refused to pay a $1 million ransom. Other exposed data included medical records, discrimination complaints, Social Security numbers and contact information of district employees.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. “In this case, everybody has a key,” said cybersecurity expert Ian Coldwater, whose son attends a Minneapolis high school.

Review: The digital sleuths who demystified cryptocurrency

December 31, 2022Frank Articles alphabay, blockchain, chainalysis, cryptocurrency, cybercrime, dark web, digital underground, hacking, ransomware, silk road

By FRANK BAJAK
December 5, 2022

“Tracers In The Dark” by Andy Greenberg (Doubleday)

The year was 2011. Cryptocurrency was a little-understood novelty, and Sen. Chuck Schumer called a news conference to vent outrage over a one-stop online shop for illegal drugs whose technology made sellers “virtually untraceable.”

The New York lawmaker’s description of Silk Road helped seed a persisting myth that technology reporter Andy Greenberg exhaustively dispels in “Tracers in the Dark,” that transactions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can’t be tracked.

Greenberg sketches the evolution of a wholly new discipline in the surprisingly lively real-life police procedural, following law officers and programmers who invent and deploy cryptocurrency-tracking tools to catch a new breed of criminal. They take down Silk Road and other “dark web” markets and merchants, finger crypto money launderers and snare the sysadmin and users of Welcome to Video, a major South-Korea-based distributor of child sexual abuse material.

Best of the action are two takedown dramas. A young Quebecois behind the AlphaBay dark web market, Alexandre Cazes, lives large in Thailand, rocketing around in a Lamborghini, running up $12,000 restaurant bills and boasting of adulterous sexploits online. The other takedown is of a DEA agent and a Secret Service agent who illegally enriched themselves off Silk Road while investigating it – each wholly on their own.

In crosshairs of ransomware crooks, cyber insurers struggle

July 26, 2021Frank Articles cyber insurance, ransoms, ransomware, ransomware ban

By FRANK BAJAK

July 5, 2021

BOSTON (AP) — In the past few weeks, ransomware criminals claimed as trophies at least three North American insurance brokerages that offer policies to help others survive the very network-paralyzing, data-pilfering extortion attacks they themselves apparently suffered.

Cybercriminals who hack into corporate and government networks to steal sensitive data for extortion routinely try to learn how much cyber insurance coverage the victims have. Knowing what victims can afford to pay can give them an edge in ransom negotiations. The cyber insurance industry, too, is a prime target for crooks seeking its customers’ identities and scope of coverage.

Before ransomware evolved into a full-scale global epidemic plaguing businesses, hospitals, schools and local governments, cyber insurance was a profitable niche industry. It was accused of fueling the criminal feeding frenzy by routinely recommending that victims pay up, but kept many from going bankrupt.

Now, the sector isn’t just in the criminals’ crosshairs. It’s teetering on the edge of profitability, upended by a more than 400% rise last year in ransomware cases and skyrocketing extortion demands. As a percentage of premiums collected, cyber insurance payouts now top 70%, the break-even point.

FULL STORY