Atlanta city employees coming to work this morning were handed an unusual notice: don’t turn on your computers. The municipal systems had been hit with a ransomware attack on Thursday, and employees were not to use their computer until they were cleared by the municipal IT group.
Why wouldn’t the government disclose a cybersecurity vulnerability? According to a White House blog post, it could mean foregoing “an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks,” writes White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel.
Braggarts never prosper: A British man has been charged with hacking into U.S. government computers and stealing data about thousands of employees, then boasting about it on Twitter.