The Kansas court system is down. It has been hacked with ransomware. Lawyers are faxing pleadings and the clerk's office is faxing back responses. The WSJ covers the hacking here.
A few thoughts.
Yes, Kansas has a court system. Just as every bit as sophisticated as in Beechum County, Alabama. (H/T My Cousin Vinny).
Who ever thought the use of faxes would be akin to the old days?
Did you know that our own Third District was subject to a ransomware attack recently? When the attackers realized they had stolen hundreds of files and court decisions that were PCAs in criminal cases they asked the Third District to take the data back. Negotiations are on-going as to how much the 3rd DCA is charging the hackers to take their data back.*
We pay a few hundred a month for an off site backup of all our data as well as 24/7 monitoring of our computers. Which means if hacked, we would lose between 2 and four hours of work (not unsubstantial considering it is our work) and would be back up and running within an hour. And as to monitoring, we recently got an email from a tech telling us one of our laptops was nearing 100% capacity. Having downloaded some government discovery to our hard rive before moving it to the cloud, we were impressed with how quickly our tech people were notified and acted. But that's private industry, and not government work.
Apparently Kansas's compuserv account was hacked with the password "Password1234'. (in the future, add a "!" to the password. Duh).
Rumpole public service announcement:
With the advent of more powerful computer and AI, A seven-word password can be hacked in four seconds. An 18-character password, using the same current technology will take 481,000 years to crack (or about as long as it takes to get an A-form from the 9th Floor Clerk's office). So do yourself a favor and check your bank and credit passwords and update them. We have clients who would love you to do nothing.
*Most of this is not true and is a parody, other than the number of PCAs in criminal appeals.
1 comment:
Rumpole, I believe most computer systems are set up to prevent "brute force" hacking of passwords as you describe. Simply, after a few wrong attempts/guesses at a password, an alarm is raised and no more attempts allowed in a row.
Post a Comment