Ransomware hits Atlanta police dashcam footage

Ransomware hits Atlanta police dashcam footage

In March, years of video evidence gathered by police was lost thanks to a ransomware attack on Atlanta in the US.

Atlanta police chief, Erika Shields, said that the lost evidence involves dashcam recordings and was not able to be recovered.

About one-third of all software used by city agencies and departments is believed to have been affected by the attack.

The attack has since been revealed to have been more serious that first thought. The city has assigned an extra £7.1m to finance its recovery efforts.

The municipal courts in Atlanta were shut for several weeks during the height of the attack and huge amounts of legal documents stretching back decades are believed to have been scrambled by the malware.

The infection was know as ‘SamSam’, and the hackers encrypted key data and demanded $51,000 of bitcoins to unlock it. The ransom was not paid.

bbc.news.co.uk (7th June 2018)

Microsoft buys GitHub code-sharing site

Microsoft buys GitHub code-sharing site

Microsoft has announced that it is to acquire the code sharing site Github.

San Francisco based Github is an online platform that allows coders to collaborate with each other on their work.

Microsoft will be paying £5.6bn for the company – which will continue to operate independently. The deal is due to be completed by the end of the year.

In a statement, the chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said ‘We recognise the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenge’.

Github is currently used by more than 28 million developers, who in turn represent more than 1.2 million organisations across a range of industries.

The business will be led by Nat Friedman, the founder of Xamarin – a mobile software development service acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github’s current chief executive, Chris Wanstrath, will move elsewhere in its corporation to work on strategic software initiatives.

 

www.bbc.co.uk/technews (5th June 2018)