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Yesterday, some residents of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, were left without electricity after the city's power company got attacked by a ransomware virus. City Power, the company responsible for powering South Africa's financial capital Johannesburg, confirmed Thursday on Twitter that it had been hit by a Ransomware virus that had encrypted all of its databases, applications, and network. The attack prevented prepaid customers from buying electricity units, upload invoices when making payments, or access the City Power's official website, eventually leaving them without power. "Please note that the virus hit us early Thursday morning, compromising our database and other software, impacting most of our applications and networks," the city government said in a tweet . However, the company has also ensured its customers that none of their details were compromised in the cyber attack. At the time of writing, the company confirmed they h

The same group of hackers that caused the power outage across several regions in Ukraine last Christmas holidays might have once again shut down power supply in northern Ukraine during the weekend. According to Ukrainian energy provider Ukrenergo, a cyber attack on Kyiv's power grid may have caused the power outages in the country on Saturday, December 17, near midnight. The blackout affected the northern part of Kiev, the country's capital, and surrounding areas, Ukrenergo Director Vsevolod Kovalchuk explained in a post on Facebook. Shortly after the incident, Ukrenergo engineers switched to manual mode and started restoring power in approximately 30 minutes in an effort to deal with the cyber attack. Power was fully restored after just an hour and fifteen minutes of the blackout. According to Kovalchuk, the one responsible for the weekend outage could be an "external interference through data network," however, the company's cybersecurity experts a

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

The country which built a Digital Iron Dome , Israel had undergone one of the largest serious cyber attack this year. This time, the name of Israel is being popped up in the current headlines is for the massive cyber attack which triggered against the Nation's Electrical Power Grid Authority's Network. "Yesterday we identified one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced," Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz confirmed at the CyberTech 2016 Conference at the Tel Aviv Trade Fair and Convention Center on Tuesday, according to an article published by The Times of Israel. "The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it," Steinitz added. "We'd to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over...but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should." Sev

SCADA system has always been an interesting target for cyber crooks, given the success of Stuxnet malware that was developed by the US and Israeli together to sabotage the Iranian nuclear facilities a few years ago, and " Havex " that previously targeted organizations in the energy sector. Now once again, hackers have used highly destructive malware and infected, at least, three regional power authorities in Ukraine, causing blackouts across the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine on 23rd December. The energy ministry confirmed it was investigating claims a cyber attack disrupted local energy provider Prykarpattyaoblenergo, causing the power outage that left half of the homes in Ivano-Frankivsk without electricity just before Christmas. According to a Ukrainian news service TSN, the outage was the result of nasty malware that disconnected electrical substations. Related Read: Dragonfly Russian Hackers Target 1000 Western Energy Firms . First Malware to