FREE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BLOG FOR PROFESSIONALS

Enlarge / Saudi defence ministry spokesman Colonel Turki bin Saleh al-Malki displays pieces of what he said were Iranian cruise missiles and drones recovered from the attack site that targeted Saudi Aramco's facilities, during a press conference in Riyadh on September 18, 2019. US officials have now said that the US responded with a cyber attack against Iran's "propaganda" infrastructure. (credit: FAYEZ NURELDINE / Getty Images) Reuters reports that the United States launched a "secret cyber operation" against Iran in September, following the alleged drone and missile attack by Iran on Saudi Arabian oil facilities . Unnamed officials told Reuters that the late-September cyberattack targeted Iran's "propaganda" infrastructure. The attack, one official said, affected physical hardware. But no further details were provided. Just how effective this targeted attack was, or if it actually did any damage, is far from clear. When asked about t...

Enlarge / This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you...from ransomware. (credit: Alex Wroblewski / Getty ) In a report to a committee of the Baltimore City Council last week, City Auditor Josh Pasch said that the city's Information Technology department could not provide any documentation of its work toward meeting agency performance goals because the only copies of that data were kept on local hard drives and never backed up to a server or the cloud. As the Baltimore Sun's Luke Broadwater reports , Pasch told the council: Performance measures data were saved electronically in responsible personnel's hard drives. One of the responsible personnel's hard drive was confiscated, and the other responsible personnel's selected files were removed due to the May 2019 ransomware incident...One of the things I’ve learned in my short time here is a great number of Baltimore City employees store entity information on their local computers. And that’s it....