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.
Related: In Baltimore And Beyond, A Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Havoc
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:53PM (5 children)
Time for a new city council.
This story smells. One email attachment was able to infect an entire city government computer network? WTF? Were they still running Novell NetWare on 286s? Did they back anything up, ever? They were one hard drive crash away from irreversible data loss? Many large organizations have poor security, but this sounds like too much. It's so ridiculous that a conspiracy seems a more likely story. Maybe a majority of the council members know the data kidnappers?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:18PM (2 children)
A guy in San Diego working for the port district told me all he does at work is look at porn on their work computer. You can't get rid of stupid, especially lazy civil service stupid.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nuke on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:30PM
So are you saying that Riviera Beach's data is likely to be all porn? Must be hot stuff to pay $600.000 to get it back.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:31PM
What if the files viewed on that "worker's" computer were lost to ransom ware?
Then would it be worth $600 K (or less) to prevent that from happening?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:28PM
I should run for office now as a get rich quick scheme.
1) Once I get in, I can email myself some trojan software. "absent-mindedly" click on the attachment in my email and infect the city's computers.
2) Vote to pay the ransom which goes to my anonymous bitcoin account.
3) Profit.
Of course, I would always remove the trojan after I collect the ransom, after all if I set the premise that I am truthful and always return the data, I can repeat the scam every month and the rest of the idiots will continue to pay out. Notice that even the summary said they were investing in new computers, not better security.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:01PM
My money would be on the backup system being on the same network as the production system, and equally affected by the ransomware. They probably hadn't learned you need to keep the backups isolated to avoid this.