At this point, we all know that the threat posed by hackers and incidents caused due to them has reached an all-new level and the fact that these incidents keep on increasing raises questions and issues for everyone working anywhere in the world. Now, there is a new report regarding another hacking incident that has come to light and it is related to the University of California, San Francisco also known as UCSF. As per the report, UCSF had to pay extortion of more than $1M to the hackers to regain lost access to their servers after a hacking incident took place earlier.
As UCSF’s statement, “UCSF IT staff detected a security incident that occurred in a limited part of the UCSF School of Medicine’s IT environment a few days earlier” on June 3. As an update to the earlier statement, UCSF said that “it negotiated with the hackers to pay a portion of the ransom to regain access to the medical school servers”. The hackers who are not known so far extorted $1 million from UCSF since they attacked the medical servers with ransomware.
Further adding to the statement, UCSF said that “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,”
Importantly, one reporter of the BBC claims that UCSF was and is working on Covid-19 related research meaning that the data is of utmost importance right now. The University also added that they appreciate everyone’s concern on this matter but “we are limited in what we can share while we continue with our investigation,”
