Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice suffers ransomware attacks during judgement sessions that we're taking place over video conference.
Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice suffers ransomware attacks during judgement sessions that we're taking place over video conference.
The incident occurred on Tuesday 3rd November 2020, while trial sessions we're taking place. According to the Superior Tribunal de Justica (STJ), a virus was found in the Court's network and, as a precautionary measure, the links to the Internet were disconnected, urging the cancellation of trial sessions. All the Court's systems, including email, as well as the telephony set up, became unavailable due to the attack.
The Secretariat for Information and Communication Technology (STI) is working on systems recovery to restore all court services as quickly as possible.
The systems of the Superior Tribunal de Justica were quickly shut down to stop the spread throughout the court's network but not before all case files and backups were encrypted according to STJ IT specialists.
Two days after the ransomware attack took place, the Superior Court of Justice website and systems are still offline until all systems are fully restored.
"A Domain Admin account was exploited which allowed the hacker to have access to our servers, to enter into administration groups of the virtual environment and, finally, encrypt a good part of our virtual machines," as one of the IT technicians told O Bastidor.
The court's judgement sessions, virtual or by video conference will be either suspended or cancelled until the court network’s security is restored to normal.
According to the resolution, administrative, civil and criminal procedural deadlines are suspended from the 3rd to the 9th of November (inclusive), returning to flow on the 10th," a statement on the court's website said.
BleepingComputer received a copy of ransom that was found on the systems of the STJ and confirmed that the court was a victim of an attack launched by the RansomExx ransomware group.
The RansomExx is human-operated ransomware that became more active during June 2020 and is known for attacking high-profile organisations.
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