A Catalan public university suffered a catastrophic cyberattack in the fall of 2021. A network made up of more than 10,000 computers. Getting back to normal has taken months.
This type of attack is usually a kind of hijacking that consists of making the files useless, “encrypting” them so that they can no longer be opened or read, unless a way is found to “decrypt” them, which normally only it can be done by the attackers themselves. The thing spreads automatically through the institution’s internal computer network, and in the worst case it can infect all computers.
What hackers, attackers or cybercriminals want is to earn large amounts of money quickly by committing a crime, and this is what they usually ask for if the victim is large.
The victim did the right thing and did not accept the demands. The police always repeat that you should not give in to what cybercriminals ask. They asked for a millionaire amount (about 3 million), a demand that should not be given in any way, because it would give these people wings and make this type of malicious practice proliferate even more.
Arreglar un ciberataque a gran escala cuesta tanto o más que el rescate. Pero es la mejor opción dadas las circunstancias. This not only includes restoring normal operation, but also incorporating many extra security measures that were not there before, in addition to renovating old computers, and all this is what they did at said university, all correct measures, surely advised by experts and Mossos.
Fixing a large-scale cyber attack is much more expensive and costly in general than preventing it. In fact, on a small and medium scale as well. EAt Inforolot we strongly recommend investing in cybersecurity, not because we offer the services, but for the security of companies and for their future. These criminal practices are becoming more common every day, and the cybersecurity sector in general is growing dramatically. We have seen with our own eyes companies that, from one day to the next, go from functioning well to being on the verge of bankruptcy due to cyberattacks that have caused a halt in activity for months.
