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Second Florida City Pays Ransom to Hackers

VOA News

   A second small city in Florida has agreed to pay hundreds of thousands
   of dollars in ransom to cybercriminals who disabled its computer
   system.

   Days after ransomware crippled the city of about 12,000 residents,
   officials of Lake City agreed this week to meet the hackers' ransom
   demand: 42 Bitcoin or about $460,000.

   Last week, River Bench, in Palm Beach County, paid $600,000 in Bitcoin
   to retrieve its data. In both cases, most of the money will be paid by
   insurance companies.

   On Thursday, Key Biscayne, a third Florida city, said it too had been
   targeted by a cyberattack. But city officials said it had managed to
   restore most of its computer systems by late Wednesday.

   Ransomware, a type of malicious software designed to deny access to a
   computer system or data until a ransom is paid, is becoming an epidemic
   in the public sector.

   The cybersecurity firm Recorded Future reported in May that 170 city,
   county or state government systems have been attacked since 2013.

   Ransomware attacks are not limited to small cities. Baltimore, a city
   of more than 600,000, has been fighting a cyber breach since May. The
   city refused to pay the $80,000 ransom that the hackers demanded.
   Instead, it has spent $18 million on data recovery.

   Similarly, the city of Atlanta spent nearly $17 million after it was
   targeted in March 2018.

   In November, the FBI indicted two Iranian men in a computer hacking and
   extortion scheme that targeted cities like Atlanta and Newark, N.J., in
   addition to the Port of San Diego, the Colorado Department of
   Transportation and six health care-related organizations. The estimated
   losses added up to more than $30 million.

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