UCSF Pays $1.14m Ransomware Fee

The University Of California San Francisco finally confirmed that it had forked over $1.14m to ransomware thieves last week, less than a month after discovering that critical academic data related to its COVID-19 research had been encrypted.

The university said in a statement on Friday that it had detected a security incident affecting some of its School of Medicine servers on June 1. It had quarantined the affected IT systems at the time. The attackers managed to encrypt some of the university's systems with ransomware and demanded a payment. Although the university believed that no patient's medical records were affected, the data was important enough that it was forced to play ball with the criminals. It said:

"The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good. We therefore made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained."

UCSF was one of three higher education establishments to be targeted in a single week at the start of June by the Netwalker ransomware gang.

The BBC received a tip that enabled it to drop in on a chat session between UCSF and the criminal gang on the dark web. According to the chat transcript, Netwalker originally asked for a $3m ransom, but UCSF countered, asking them to accept $780,000. The tw ..

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