A $1.14 million ransom reportedly paid to hackers by University of California San Francisco. The attack initiated by NetWalker Group which restricted their servers making it inaccessible for It expert to craw into the server and check whether or not it can be decrypted with the need to pay the ransom which was requested by the hackers. The spokesman for the leading medical research school stated in an article ;
“The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good. [...] We, therefore, made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained.”
BBC News reported that the haggling between the Hackers and University wasn't successful on the first set of negotiation which the university offered $780,000 to the hackers which they refused. Officials at the university eventually came to the final of $1,140,895 proposal which then was acceptable to the hackers. Immediately after the gangs accepted the offered a sum of 116.4BTC was sent to the hackers the next days and decryption software was released to UCSF.
The University of California isn't the only school with was hit by the Netwalker Gangs, At the beginning of June, the NetWalker group targeted University Michigan. The operators behind the ransomware threatened to release files and records for students. School representatives said that they wouldn't pay the ransom demanded by the hackers.
TIPS
Shutdown RDP and disable PowerShell if not required and also using multifactor authentication in everything.
