Florida City Pays $600,000 Bitcoin Ransom To Hackers After Ransomware Attack

[Swordsmyth]

The Florida City of Riviera Beach paid a $600,000 to hackers who took over its computer system in a ransomware extortion operation, paralyzing the city's operations, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Everyone from the city council on down was been left without email and phone service. Paychecks that were supposed to be direct-deposited to employee bank accounts instead had to be hand-printed by finance department staffers working overtime. Police searched their closets to find paper tickets for issuing traffic citations.
...
In a meeting Monday night announced only days before, the board voted 5-0 to authorize the city insurer to pay 65 bitcoins, a hard-to-track cryptocurrency valued at approximately $592,000. An additional $25,000 would come out of the city budget, to cover its policy deductible. Without discussion on the merits, the board tackled the agenda item in two minutes, voted and moved on. -Palm Beach Post

The Riviera Beach City Council unanimously voted last week to meet the hackers' demands, after the Palm Beach suburb's records were encrypted. The counsel had previously voted to spend $1 million on computer upgrades three weeks ago.
According to the Post, the FBI and DHS are investigating the attack, which began after someone in the police department opened an infected email on May 29.
"This whole thing is so new to me and so foreign and it’s almost where I can’t even believe that this happens but I’m learning that it’s not as uncommon as we would think it is," said Council Chairwoman KaShamba Miller-Anderson in a Wednesday statement. "Every day I’m learning how this even operates, because it just sounds so far fetched to me."

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...somware-attack

[timosman]

Cheaper than hiring security "experts".

[Brian4Liberty]

An additional $25,000 would come out of the city budget, to cover its policy deductible

Majority of the money was paid by the insurer.

[Stratovarious]

''We don't negotiate with terrorists''

[Origanalist]

"Council Chairwoman KaShamba Miller-Anderson"?













I don't even want to know.........

[timosman]

"Council Chairwoman KaShamba Miller-Anderson"?

http://www.rivierabch.com/content/24...527/24655.aspx

[Origanalist]

http://www.rivierabch.com/content/24...527/24655.aspx

Apparently you missed the second sentence of my post.

[Swordsmyth]

Cyber-criminals have struck for the second week in a row, this time on a small Florida city called Lake City, according to the WSJ. The city has agreed to pay ransom to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars after a ransomware attack crippled its systems.
Lake City's council approved the measure during an emergency meeting Monday night and will be paying about $462,000 via Bitcoin, by way of the city's insurer. This payment follows a similar incident in Riviera Beach, a city of 34,000 near West Palm Beach, where the city's council authorized a similar $600,000 ransom payment.

The event [in Lake City] began June 10 with what the city described as a “triple threat” malware attack, then escalated with a ransom demand last week, the city said in a news release. The attack knocked out email and hindered city services, and people had to temporarily pay utility bills on terminals at the police station, the city manager said. The attack included a ransomware variant called Ryuk that is known for hefty ransom demands.
Emergency services weren’t affected. But Lake City authorities worried they wouldn’t be able to access encrypted files such as ordinances, public-record requests and utility information.

The FBI advises against paying hackers, saying there's no guarantee they will release data and that it could make victims susceptible to future attacks. But some victims don't have a choice: for instance, in March, Jackson County, Georgia paid $400,000 after realizing a cyber attack had compromised its backups.
Joe Helfenberger, city manager in Lake City said: “I thought we had a backup, but obviously we didn’t have a good enough backup for this kind of attack. Fortunately, we had all the financial data backed up properly off-site, so that wasn’t affected, but pretty much everything else was.”
The payouts are emboldening hackers to raise their demands. Ponemon said: “That might explain why the ransom is going up: The bad guys can get away with it.”

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...cripples-citys

[Swordsmyth]

Headlines started hitting the wires after 11 am Monday about a ransomware attack that has brought down Georgia Courts' digital information operations. Officials confirmed to WXIA Atlanta that the website for Georgia's Administrative Office of the Courts and Judicial Council of Georgia had been down all morning.



Georgia Courts spokesman Bruce Shaw said all systems hadn't been affected, but the network as a whole was taken down to quarantine the infection. Shaw said the IT department would be meeting with "external agencies" (FBI Atlanta) on Monday afternoon to asses the severity of the attack.
Shaw didn't disclose how much the hackers demanded to unlock an unknown amount of computers from the crippling ransomware. There was no mention of what type of payment they required if it was cryptocurrency or US dollars.
Government officials said private data isn't stored on the systems that were affected, and that no social security or other personal information was compromised.


Back in March 2018, the City of Atlanta was hit with ransomware that significantly disrupted government operations. In that case, Atlanta officials rejected the idea to pay the $50,000 ransom, ended up costing the city millions of dollars to recover from the incident.
In March, Georgia's Jackson County paid hackers a $400,000 ransom payment to restore computer systems.
And currently, on Monday morning, the third city in Florida has been attacked by hackers demanding payment to restore servers. Key Biscayne joins Riviera Beach and Lake City in having its computer systems infected by ransomware after it identified a data security breach last week. In all three cities, the ransomware entered the network through an employee opening up a web link that allowed it to be uploaded.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...somware-attack

[kpitcher]

If only they had regular IT practices of offsite backups and network security, I bet they saved a bundle. I hope they fire some people over this.

[timosman]

The last time the site was archived on archive.org is 1/22. Have they been battling this for 5 months?

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://georgiacourts.gov/


Child support site is also down - https://web.archive.org/web/20190123...giacourts.gov/

[timosman]

This is gold - https://web.archive.org/web/20161123...gov/content/qa

what is a data file?
A data file is a text (plain) file that contains the information of the case participants.

This file serves as the building block for creating a case in the efiling application.



What is a pdf?
A pdf is an image of a document. Usually we use pdf format to store documents that we don't want to modify



What is "web-based" application?
An application that can be accessed by pointing the browser to the site of the application.



What is Child Support GAJE Efiling?
A Child Support GAJE Efiling application is an application that transmits data and filings from a local child support office to the superior court. the GAJE part of the name stands for Georgia Judicial Exchange.



How else is Child Support GAJE Efiling known as?
child support efiling, E-Filing, efiling



What is a module or component in efiling?
A module or a component is a part of the application. For example the LegalPreparer, the Attorney, the Clerk parts



What are the main modules in efiling?
LegalPreparer, Attorney, Clerk.



What do I need to have available before I create a case in Efiling?
Two resources:

1. The data file containing the information about the case participants

2. The documents package containing the documents for the initail filing. These documents are the doc-gen word documents that have been converted into pdf.



What is Legal Preparer?
A Legal preparer is responsible for interacting with $tars to produce the documents to be filed into court.



What does an attorney do with efiling?
An attorney logs on to the system, views the filings sent by the Legal Preparer, signs the necessary documents and if the files and the data appear to be correct sends the filing to the clerk



What does a clerk do with efiling?
The clerk reviews the cases sent by the attorney, signs the necessary documents and if the files and the data appear to be correct "accepts" the filings and "queues" the filings for import.



Does efiling "talk" to $STARS?
No, efiling uses resources from $stars. These resources can found on the machine of the user and are not extracted from $tars by the efiling application.



How does efiling communicate with the case management system of a court?
Through web services.



What does a vendor need to do to accept transmissions from efiling?
The vendor must create a program that on demand downloads cases accepted by the clerk and imports them into the local cms

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

Wow they have pretty good insurance if it covers acts of mental retardation

What happened to not negotiating with terrorists?

I guess it's cheap when it's taxpayer money.

[Swordsmyth]

A Florida city reportedly has fired one of its top tech employees after officials were forced to pay $460,000 in ransom to the hackers behind a cyber attack that disabled its servers, phones and email accounts.
Brian Hawkins, Lake City's director of information technology, was let go from his job Monday, about three weeks after the hackers' malware compromised the city's computer network, according to WCJB.
“Our city manager did make a decision to terminate one employee and he is revamping our whole IT department to comply with what we need to be able to overcome what happened... so it doesn't happen again,” Mayor Stephen Witt told the station.

More at: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/florida...es-it-director

[UWDude]

A Florida city reportedly has fired one of its top tech employees after officials were forced to pay $460,000 in ransom to the hackers behind a cyber attack that disabled its servers, phones and email accounts.
Brian Hawkins, Lake City's director of information technology, was let go from his job Monday, about three weeks after the hackers' malware compromised the city's computer network, according to WCJB.
“Our city manager did make a decision to terminate one employee and he is revamping our whole IT department to comply with what we need to be able to overcome what happened... so it doesn't happen again,” Mayor Stephen Witt told the station.

More at: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/florida...es-it-director

I find it very hard to believe it was the IT guy using government computers to click on gambling and investment websites and social media trawling.

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

I find it very hard to believe it was the IT guy using government computers to click on gambling and investment websites and social media trawling.

I find it hard to believe they had to pay the ransom and they had nothing backed up.