• OMG North Korea attacked the LA Times… and other nonsensical security stuff

    Posted on December 31, 2018 at 08:04 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    You may have read the articles going around, starting Saturday afternoon, that claimed the LA Times and other current and former Tribune Publishing newspapers were under active attack by a nation state. That explains why your newspaper may have been late on Saturday.

    Except, of course, it’s all hogwash. Now it looks like the LA Times was hit by a garden variety Ryuk ransomware attack. Not to cast shade on the problems with a ransomware attack on a large company, which can be considerable, but the rush to blame the Bad Guys du jour for a diabolical attack is disconcerting. The fact that several other news outlets picked up on the Sky is Falling cry should give y’all pause.

    Cooler heads will prevail. Although it may take a while.

    There’s a great writeup from Robert M. Lee about the incident:

    Shortly after Tribune Publishing lost operations and ability to print papers the press highlighted that there was a cyber attack. The attack was highlighted as a targeted attack by a nation-state. This was all related to one anonymous insider at the company telling the media. Thus, early on I, and many others on social media, called for calm and patience while the details became public. The details are still not public and the company hasn’t officially responded but an insider told media sources that the malware used in the attack was Ryuk

    So if your Sainted Aunt Martha warns you about them furriners breaking down printing presses in Los Angeleeees, you can smile and go back to sipping egg nog.

    Along those same lines… I still haven’t heard of any Internet Explorer-based infections, ones worthy of the way-out-of-band emergency patch on Dec. 19. Remember how the “Windows security experts” were running around in circles, telling people they had to patch IE immediately, or face dire consequences? Yeah. Crickets.

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