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A Florida city's council voted to pay a ransom of $600,000 in Bitcoin to hackers that targeted its computer systems — and the payout is a sign of how unprepared much of the US is to deal with a coming wave of cyber attacks.
The city council of Riviera Beach, 50 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, voted on Monday to meet the demands of their hackers in the hope of getting back their compromised data, CBS News reported.
According to The Palm Beach Post, the attack began on May 29, when a employee from the police department opened an email attachment that contained malware. The software quickly spread through the city's computer systems, affecting its email system and even the 911 dispatch operations.
The New York Times reported that the hackers demanded their ransom in bitcoin. The paper noted that there is no guarantee that hackers will honor their end of the deal after getting the money. CBS reported that the council already voted to spend $1 million on new computers after the attack.
Also at CNN.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:24PM (4 children)
And then there's the "$1 million on new computers".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:31PM
That was a bit of an odd thing to. It doesn't say that they are replacing all the computers, but we can assume it is. So from that they only value their own data to around, or less then, $400k? Probably less since they most likely also include salaries of the technicians and various consultant fees and such in that difference to. Not to bad for restoring a backup, or they did forgot to make those to? Don't they run some kind of attachment scanning on the email servers? So many questions.
From the article it appears that other cities extorted for a lot less refused to pay. So why would they agree to pay $600k? I can't really comprehend that at the moment.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:59PM (2 children)
That does seem strange. It'd be cheaper to just re-image their computers or return them to factory defaults...
Unless, perhaps, they never moved past Windows XP or something, and that's why it spread so easily - they essentially had such old equipment as to be defenseless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:26PM (1 child)
Dollars to donuts says they had no backup policy. Particularly since it is a small city, meaning that IT support is probably not a well supported position.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:55PM
This ^
If you have a backup policy, and enforce it, you can always go back. Depending on just how vigorous your backups are, you may lose a couple day's work, or a week's work, but you can always go back in time, and reset.
There is the issue of determining how far back in time you have to go for a good backup, but losing a week, or three weeks, is better than losing everything.
As for wholesale replacement of computers - these people are clueless.