The Biggest Software Company in the US under Ransomware Attack on Election Night

Tyler Technologies in Plano, Texas, was under a ransomware attack last week. The company sells software that cities and states in the United States use to display election results. This marks around a thousand such attacks against the contractors, the small towns, and cities running voting systems. 

According to the reports, the majority of these attacks are conducted by Russian criminal groups. However, this attack was rattling less than 40 days before the election, and it had some outsiders who tried to log into the systems countrywide on Friday night.

Tyler Technologies does not particularly tally votes. The election officials use it to aggregate and report them in 20 areas across the country. This was a soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the United States Cyber Command were worried about. 

The company did not discuss the attack in detail. It seemed like the usual ransomware attacks where the systems are blocked until the victims pay the ransom, generally in cryptocurrencies. However, this one raises fears because some of the employees reported that outsiders were trying to access the systems on Friday night. It is believed that the attack may not be for easy profit only. 

Learn about ransomware hazards from Hazards of Ransomware are real for Cryptocurrency Miners