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Old 06-10-2016, 12:00 PM   #46
Rathji
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ZedMan View Post
There is no 'IT' faculty. There's Computer Science and those guys are probably closer to mathematicians than IT admins.
The CPSC faculty manages it's own IT resources (mostly) independantly of the UCIT system. The guys who admin it are likely the most competent on the campus at doing this kind of thing. That doesn't mean they are perfect, mind you.

The reason they paid out was that it was faster to do that than recover backups for everything. IIRC their backup jobs run pretty much constantly and it would take forever to do a recovery of that size.

That said, it was almost certainly not Cryptolocker or TeslaCrypt, but was most than likely Locky.

The people who are running Locky are targeting businesses who they figure *must* pay or their business will lose more money due to the downtime. Can you imagine the chaos and money loss at the university if even just a handful of profs or a single department lost a day or 2 worth of data? You could be talking about results of projects that spanned many months and hundreds of man-hours. There was a big hospital in California a few months ago that paid an equivalent sum.

This isn't about the IT department being incompetent, and anyone who has ever dealt with this can tell you that even if you take every precaution, some idiot user will click on that email attachment or enable the macro in Word and you are pooched.
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