Howard County: Ransomware attack worse than originally thought

Howard County (Indiana) government officials reported that more files than originally thought were impacted by a pair of ransomware attacks that took place in November.

The county is now saying 76,000 files were encrypted by the attack, up from the 33,000 originally estimated, according the Kokomo Tribune.  The hackers used a pair of phishing emails disguised as a message from FedEx that contained malicious attachments. Each was opened and clicked injecting the malware.

The county was able to recover the files through its multilayer backup program, which consists of using tape, disk to disk and cloud backup systems.

“Basically, our vendors provide solutions for us to come in and grab our data every night that's been changed and they'll store that for us in case there's an attack,” Howard County Network Administrator Jeremy Stevens told the Tribune.

Backing up data is the best way for any organization to defend against ransomware attacks.