SamSam Virus Infected CDOT‘S Computers, Demands Bitcoin

On 21st February 2018, SamSam virus infected Colorado Department of Transportation Computers, demanding payment through Bitcoin, in return of the save documents and files in Computer. This has made their employees of CDOT work in pen and paper, as the entire employee's computers were shut down as per security officials ordered.

When enquired about the news, David McCarthy, Chief Technology Officer, Government’s Office of Information Technology said that SamSam was an alternate to ransomware virus and they had asked the Antivirus software provider to fix the issues, immediately. He further said that they already had a strong backup and security tools, and so they have no intention to pay the hackers. The teams will look into this matter closely and will work at night. McCarthy said that Officials of Information Technology(OIT), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other security Agencies are all working together to find out the main cause of this misshapen.

In the recent interview, Amy Ford, CDOT spokeswoman said that the Ransomware hackers attacked CDOT on the early morning of Wednesday. Thus all the computers were infected and all the employee's systems were turned off. After this incident, none of them came online and all their works are been done offline. But still, some of the important works are still online, like cameras, variable message boards, CoTrip, and alerts on the stats are running on the different systems.

She further said that the message she is sharing with CDOT’S employees operating for a long time without computers is using now pen and paper. The systems which are affected more are the one which was running in Windows and are attached with some antivirus security software. There is one Mac computer in their office but they aren’t messing with that for the day.

This is not the first time that SamSam virus infected the office, in January it had infected Healthcare Industry. OIT spokeswoman Brandi Simmons said that the Ransomware is an alternate of SamSam. As per the report from security firm Trend Micro, The Ransomware encrypted the files and renamed them as “I’m sorry”. They farther enlighten with the facts that the hackers get access to employees’ username and password, remotely. It didn’t happen just because of the opening of virus-infected email by the employees. Hancock Health Hospital in Indiana paid them $55,000, to get their files.