More than 20 Texas cities and towns have been taken hostage by ransomware

I know someone that worked for a large corp that sold stuff to hospitals. Medical devices that required remote support. In the old days, what they would do is hook them up to land lines and dial into them. Then later they would build static VPN tunnels to the hospitals for support. Eventually, they all switched to running a client that talked outbound via port 443 to a central location where they could be managed. Said management was secured via AD credentials and second factor authentication.
Anyway… One hospital as they were being converted to a static tunnel had to go and re-IP all the devices. They were all sitting on PUBLIC IP’S in front of their firewall accessible from anyone typing in the IP in a browser.

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Living in texas by reason of others choices- I do indeed agree with this assessment

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It’s obviously a cinch to generalize about almost anything. I grew up and lived 31 years in Texas, then moved to Georgia for a while, then moved back because we couldn’t take it anymore. Georgia is far more backwards. Never thought I’d say that. And there’s far more open carry in Ga as well. That’s one person’s experience anyway.

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I’d like to see a list of which towns this happened in. Wouldn’t be surprising to find it is larger towns/cities.

The gap between rural and urban Texas is less than ever before. As well, people are moving here in droves, especially from California, which is changing things here in a big way. The cities have become so crowded that many of these people are moving to rural areas. It’s interesting to watch things change, much to the consternation of some of the classic rural Texan types.

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My bet is midsized cities and small cities that have grown enormously in the last decade. Big enough to have money in the bank to pay the ransom. Not big enough to have a robust and redundant ITS with employees who know how to quickly isolate and contain a threat.
And Dallas. I have no confidence in the professionalism of Dallas.

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Enormously? That’s an understatement. The highways here have been expanded, and it’s still not enough to accommodate the massive influx that’s been happening here the last eight or ten years. The electric grid is so over taxed from the expansion that we’re having brown outs and on the verge of a black out just this month.

Yeah, you’re wise not have any confidence in the professionalism of Dallas. Upon moving back, there was no way it was going to be inside the Dallas city limits. It’s almost as goofy as living in Atlanta.

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