‘Time Bomb’ May Have Destroyed 800 Norfolk City PCs
Summary: The City of Norfolk, Virginia reported that an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on 784 PCs and laptops out of roughly 4,500 city systems, beginning on Feb. 9. IT director Hap Cluff said the malware appeared designed to trash vital operating files in the Windows\System32 folder, cutting healthy directories of about 1.5GB to roughly a third of that size and rendering machines unbootable, and that investigators found the distribution point was a print server handling jobs for Norfolk City Hall.
Why it matters: Only PCs shut down between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 9 were hit - the one hour it took network and security engineers to move from discovery to containment - and because technicians rebuilt the print server first to restore services, an exact copy of the malware may never be recovered.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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