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Ransomware Infects City of Atlanta Computers

posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 23 2018, @06:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-a-backup? dept.
Security

SomeGuy writes:

WSBTV is reporting that a large number of City of Atlanta computers have been infected by ransomware.

The city has been experiencing outages on internal and external networks, that are affecting the ability to pay bills and access court-related information.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are investigating, and Atlanta Information Management is working with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue

Atlanta COO Richard Cox confirmed the attack in a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said it happened at 5:40 a.m. Cox said several departments have been affected by the attack.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms warned "This is a very serious situation", "We don't know the extent, so I would ask for people to assume that you may be included." She further warned employees to monitor their bank accounts and that possible compromised information may belong to the public.

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/fbi-looking-into-citywide-computer-issues-in-atlanta/720045695

Also at ArsTechnica and The Washington Post

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @08:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @08:20AM (#657053)

    What's not to love about it?

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by cocaine overdose on Friday March 23 2018, @08:37AM (1 child)

    by cocaine overdose (6886) <cocaineoverdose@protonmail.com> on Friday March 23 2018, @08:37AM (#657060) Homepage Journal
    What really popped out at you, was that Atlanta City has a COO. Chief Operating Officer, not some weird government acronym. If they run Atlanta anything like your average startup, then nothing comes as a surprise. Someone with access to the servers made a no-no. And someone who's responsible for the servers, made a no-no in allowing that person to have access. It's like a CTO demanding he has the passwords for every database and server, keeps them in a plaintext file on his Alienware laptop, and then gets his data transmitted when he forgets to close that one, very small popup that appears in the bottom right, when you browse porn sites without an adblocker/umatrix.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday March 23 2018, @01:30PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Friday March 23 2018, @01:30PM (#657110)

      But they have all of the latest Windows 10 updates installed, and the web sites they use have HTTPS, so they are perfectly secure from anything bad, right? Right?!

  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday March 23 2018, @10:58AM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Friday March 23 2018, @10:58AM (#657082)

    When further interviewed about the cyber attack on government computers, city employees and city leaders responded: "Whatsacomputer"? :P

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 23 2018, @02:23PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday March 23 2018, @02:23PM (#657122) Journal

      And the name of the ransomware? Microsoft Windows, was that the name?

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