Florida city will pay hackers $600,000 to get its computer systems back

[Winston]

The City of Atlanta had something like this happen a year or two back. Atlanta didn't have insurance (it does now, I think), and didn't pay the ransom. It took them months to get some systems back in operation.

I'd guess a lot of cities are using legacy systems and very old equipment that's not getting current patches, and don't have good procedures for getting out the patches they do have available.

I think C(-)ris has it right about the difficulty of dealing with backups on an infected system. But add on top of that how budgeting and implementation works for any public entity, and I can understand how difficult even large cities find it to respond. You'd think it was a huge market opportunity for someone like IBM, Deloitte, or Oracle to come up with ways to fix this kind of thing quickly. But I've not heard of anyone offering that.


Good luck.

- Winston

[MrNoBody]

Baltimore was hit May 7th with a demand for $80,000. They refused to pay
per advice received from the FBI.
Systems are still not 100% restored and secured and the rebuild cost is projected
to be $18,000,000.

Attack is believed to have been caused by the city's IT personnel ignoring several
notices from Microsoft to apply 'patches' to the Windows based system.

Earlier, the NY Times erroneously laid blame on the NSA.

Forbes

Engadget

UNIX anyone :facepalm:

[S. Pupp]

It's time they upgraded from Windows 95.

[Acer]

Budgets constrain governments to stay a generation or two or ten behind current state of the art, even running things so old that the vendors aren't even writing patches any more.

[Winston]

Acer wrote:
Budgets constrain governments to stay a generation or two or ten behind current state of the art, even running things so old that the vendors aren't even writing patches any more.

Unlike modern folk like me, who are only using a 9 year-old MacBook Pro.


Good luck.

- Winston

[Filliam H. Muffman]

It's been happening nation wide for at least four years. This really shouldn't be an issue today, but I will admit there were people using ten year old computers/OS's at a previous employer. :dunno:

[sekker]

With M$ planning to drop security updates for Windows7, only going to get worse.