Lake County government shuts down servers after ransomware attack
After the massive cyberattack in Texas, officials from Lake County, Illinois revealed on Friday, August 23 that the county has been hit by a cyberattack that forced the shutdown of email service and several internal applications. The officials also mentioned that the breach came in the form of ransomware, which is a type of malware that prevents users from accessing their system or personal files and demands a ransom payment in order to regain access. Mark Pearman, director of county's information technology office said that on Thursday, August 22, the IT staff was installing cybersecurity software on 3,000 individual employee laptops and working on the process to remove the ransomware malware from 40 county servers. The ransomware attack was first noticed by systems administrators on Thursday and to prevent it the IT staff started taking encrypted and unencrypted servers off the network. However, the official clarified that there was no evidence of data theft from county...