Last weekend, Delaware County, Pennsylvania has paid a total of $500,000 in ransom after their systems were affected by the DoppelPaymer ransomware.
Later, Delaware County revealed that they took some part of their network offline after they identified that their network was exposed to ransomware.
The Delaware County alert stated,
The County of Delaware lately found an interruption to parts of its computer network. We initiated an urgent investigation that incorporated exerting some specific systems offline and operating with computer forensic specialists to identify the nature and extent of the event. The team is working diligently to recover the functionality of our systems.
The County additionally stated that the Bureau of Elections and the County’s Emergency Services Department were not affected by the attack as they are not part of the network of systems that were hacked.
As per the local media, the DoppelPaymer ransomware operators had access to networks that contains police reports, payroll, purchasing, and several other databases. The threat actors demanded a ransom of 500K dollars to receive a decryptor.
Several sources stated that the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang is thought to be behind the attack and Delaware County had paid the ransom as it is insured for such attacks.
DoppelPaymer is known for stealing unencrypted files while executing their attacks. However, it is unclear if they stole any files in the attack against Delaware County.
Delaware County has been advised by the ransomware gang to change the passwords of all of their systems and modify their Windows domain configuration to incorporate protections against the Mimikatz program.
Mimikatz is an open-source application generally utilized by ransomware gangs to collect Windows domain credentials on a compromised network.
The threat actors, once obtain access to a Windows domain administrator password, execute ransomware attacks on the network to encrypt devices.
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