Confidential US Court Documents Published On The Dark Web

Across the United States, local governments and public sector entities have endured a growing number of ransomware attacks throughout the year. And perhaps no region has been harder hit over the last few years than the state of Louisiana. Cyber-criminal ransomware attackers have now published apparent stolen Louisiana court documents on the Dark Web. 

The Fourth Judicial District Court was hacked by Conti ransomware and apparent proof of the attack was published on the Dark Web recently. 

The court  is one of the state's 42 judicial districts. Cases handled by the court include civil, criminal, and juvenile cases and The criminals have uploaded what appear to be the court’s papers. The alleged papers include serious crimes including a second-degree kidnapping, an armed robbery and a case of aggravated rape. 

Security researchers found evidence that the Conti ransomware strain could be a possible successor to the Ryuk crypto-malware family although details of how big a ransom the attackers are demanding have not been revealed. 

Ransomware attacks are nothing new in the State of Louisiana.

• In December 2019, an attack of this nature was carried out against Louisiana educational establishment Baton Rouge Community College. The incident occurred just two days before a planned commencement ceremony at the college. 

• A month earlier, a major ransomware attack on Louisiana state IT infrastructure forced multiple services offline, including government websites, email, and internal applications.

• In July of 2019, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency after ransomware attacks knocked out IT systems in three school districts. 

Louisiana has suffered an unfortunate string of cyber-attacks and responding to those attacks has been costly. The state spent $1.7 million responding to a single ransomware attack against its Office of Motor Vehicles in November. 

So while Louisiana didn’t pay a ransom demanded by hackers who launched a cyber-attack against state government servers last fall, the state has paid $2.3 million responding to that and other cyber-attacks across the state over the past year.

Governing:       Infosecurity Magazine:      CPO Magazine:     Tripwire:  
 

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