Ransomware Hits US District Court in Louisiana

UPDATE: In the original version of this article summarizing a Computer Business Review story, a source's  quote indicated that the Louisiana Supreme Court's website was also taken offline by malware. The court since reached out to Dark Reading with a statement that read, in part, "Please be aware that contrary to the information in the article linked below, neither the website of the Louisiana Supreme Court nor its computer network was a victim of this ransomware attack." Dark Reading has not yet received confirmation from the Court whether its website was offline for any reason on Friday. We will update this article again when more is known.

The Fourth District Court of Louisiana has been hit with ransomware, and the attackers have published court data on the Dark Web to prove their capabilities. The attack, attributed to and claimed by the "Conti" malware group, has knocked the court's website offline, according to a Computer Business Review report.

The public sector is an increasingly common target for malicious actors in cyberspace. According to Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emisoft, this marks the 207th incident at a public-sector organization in 2020.

Conti, the group behind Ryuk ransomware, uses the Trickbot malware distribution network to deliver the ransomware payload. Like Ryuk, Conti uses a variety of obfuscation and evasion techniques to avoid detection, with hundreds of commands and instructions dedicated to the task.

Read more here.