LA Valley College Pays $28,000 RansomWare Demand

In the latest big breach, the Los Angeles Valley College on recommendation of Cyber Security experts and Law Enforcement has agreed to pay $28,000 worth of Bitcoin to hackers.

They had been infected with a new strain of Ransomware called Spora which was not detected by Anti-Virus. We’re seeing these types of 0-day attacks happening much more frequently in the wild and it seems that everyone knows at least one business that’s been affected by Ransomware.

In LA Valley College’s case, the Ransomware came in through email as an attachment, the user being unaware opened the attachment and accessed the file which infected his system. This version of Spora does not need to be online or connect to a control server so it immediately started to encrypt files on the users machine and across the network. This infection affected not only their files along with internet access internally but also affected their email and voicemail systems.

Thankfully you won’t be hearing about an Idealstor Flashback customer paying a hefty ransom demand. Idealstor’s Flashback Solution has been engineered not only to backup your data locally but also sync it to the cloud with the capability of launching your backups as virtual machines instantly from either location. Flashback also includes built in Ransomware detection to give you an early warning to a Ransomware infection, allowing you to shutdown the infected machines, launch their unaffected backups and continue working as normal.

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