ATOM on how N.H.’s Local Governments Can Defend Themselves
NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Sgro, who worked with Peterborough on their cyber security emergency response after the town administration realized their finances had been compromised.
TRANSCRIPT
Rick Ganley: First, I think some of us might think of cybercrime more as a ransomware attack in which, you know, you have an entire computer or a system hacked and the funds are stolen that way in some kind of a back door attack. But in Peterborough's case, the thieves went to some lengths to actually trick town officials into thinking there was somebody else in order to divert these funds to their accounts. Is that kind of thing very common?
Jason Sgro: Yeah. So that's actually very common. Ransomware gets a lot of press today, and certainly, that is a huge attack vector that is very common. But the next common attack vectors are business email compromise and phishing attacks.
And these are attacks where someone tries to defraud you out of money or get you to divulge information by sending you an email and posing as somebody legitimate that you would normally do business with. Years ago, these types of emails used to be poorly written. They were written by non-native English speakers. And so the grammar was easy to spot, but those emails have become more and more sophisticated and more and more believable.
Rick Ganley: It's obviously profitable for them. They're doing it more often. You're seeing many more of these municipalities being targeted, you know. Why do they go after a municipality like a Peterborough as opposed to going after some other company with some kind of ransomware attack?
Jason Sgro: These are wide net attacks. In a lot of cases, they're not looking for any one town. They are casting a wide net, going after a big group of organizations. And whoever they trick, that's who they're working with. And it is important to note that these are not organizations that are targeting you because they have a specific grudge against the town of Peterborough or somebody else, right?
