It is being reported that the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus was hit on Friday by a ransomware variant, and that the damage has them still non-functioning as late as Monday morning. The political organization made a report to local press after their website was found to be down on Friday last week.
The ransomware infection has apparently affected the Caucus’ entire network, including its web server, which went down on Friday and is still down Monday morning, at the time of writing this article.
A cyberattack forced the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus to shutdown its computer system on Friday, according to a statement from the caucus’ leader Sen. Jay Costa.
The Ransomware attack, discovered early Friday morning, delivered malware to computers throughout the network, making its systems and data inaccessible to caucus members and employees throughout the day, it indicated.
The Senate Democratic offices remained open on Friday. As of 5:15 p.m., the system was still down, said caucus spokeswoman Stacey Witalec.
The state attorney general’s office and FBI were called in to investigate the hacking, which top Senate Republican staffer Drew Crompton said did not affect the GOP caucus’ system.
Joe Grace, spokesman for Attorney General Josh Shapiro, said Friday evening that Shapiro “spoke with Leader Costa this afternoon and the office is looking into the cyber-attack, which we take very seriously.”
The statement released by Caucus officials, stated that the FBI and Microsoft were called in to investigate the incident and that there was no evidence (yet) to support assumptions that the ransomware attack had targeted Pennsylvania Senate Democrats in particular. It is more likely, that this is just another of the many random ransomware infections that occur in the US and around the world daily.