Cyberattack Highlights: U.S Cities Struggles to Recover from Ransomware Attacks

In the past month, at least three Florida cities have been victims of ransomware attacks, after intrusions on larger cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore and San Diego.  While two Florida cities have now paid a ransom to regain control of their hacked computer systems, the city of Baltimore is taking a different approach.

Baltimore officials last week approved $10 million of emergency funding to recover from a similar attack after refusing to pay an $80,000 ransom at the advice of law enforcement authorities.

Cyberattacks immobilized some of the city’s systems almost two months ago, WBAL reported, but services such as water billing are still offline. The total cost of responding to the hack has reached $18.2 million, the city’s budget office estimated.

Officials in Lake City, Florida, meanwhile, decided to pay hackers a ransom of 42 bitcoins, or roughly $426,000. “I believe this was the cheapest alternative for the city,” Lake City Mayor Joe Helfenberger told WTLV-TV . The FBI, Homeland Security and US secret service have been put on to looking into the attacks in Florida and while Helfenberger says they are conducting a forensic audit, there isn’t a guarantee that they’ll make a full revival of the lost data.

The hack impacted sixteen terabytes of data, and even after paying the ransom, the city may not be able to recover all of it, WTLV-TV reported. The city’s insurance will cover $10,000 of the costs, amounting to about 2.3% of the ransom.

Riviera Beach, Fla., last month agreed to pay more than $600,000, several times what was asked of Baltimore, which did not have insurance and did not pay. The Village of Key Biscayne, near Miami, has not publicly disclosed whether it plans to pay the perpetrators of a recent ransomware attack.

Atlanta’s mayor testified last week to Congress that an attack last year, when the city refused to pay $51,000 in extortion demands, has so far cost the city $7.2 million. Atlanta had more than a third of its systems paralyzed by a March 2018 ransomware attack and recovery has taken more than a year.

As cities rush to protect their data — and others scramble to recover it — experts on cybersecurity say the growing number of attacks and escalating ransom demands suggest that cyber attackers have found a ripe target: small governments with weak computer protections and strong insurance policies. The payments keep coming even as the F.B.I. says they might be incentivizing more attacks.

Reference:

https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/local/lake-city-pays-hackers-460k-ransom-begins-data-recovery/77-44300a22-7f25-4c18-9d4f-8e78588cae51

https://www.securityinfowatch.com/cybersecurity/information-security/news/21086418/atlanta-mayor-to-congress-cities-need-funding-to-stop-cyberattacks

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-strain-to-fight-hackers-11559899800