Hackers targeted servers belonging to the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) and encrypted files hosted on those systems with ransomware.
Staff from the PGA realized Tuesday morning the nasty surprise when they could not access certain work files and were greeted with an ominous ransom note message on their computers:
“Your network has been penetrated. All files on each host in the network have been encrypted with a strong algorythm [sic].”
The attack came just before this week’s PGA Championship at Bellerive Country Club, as reported by Golfweek. The impacted files were related to that event and also upcoming Ryder Cup in France.
The hackers also warned users not to attempt breaking the encryption or the result “may lead to the impossibility of recovery of certain files.”
As of Wednesday, the IT staff had not regained control of all affected files and there was no known impact yet to the PGA Championship.