A simple click on a link by a City Government’s employee had caused the entire Government’s systems to be halted for weeks! The story of the ransomware attack in Riviera beach may have an expected ending soon.
Florida Finally Decides To Pay The Ransomware! A Sum Of $600,000 Will Be Sent To Hackers
Riviera Beach, a city of 35,000 people in Florida was hit by a virus attack in May that caused the entire city’s computer systems to be locked. Neither the Emails are working, no the 911 calls are fed into databases, even the petty water utility bills had to be settled in person. As the condition is getting worse, Florida’s city council, on Monday, has unanimously voted to comply with the hacker’s demand.
The attack started when an employee of Government had clicked on a link from one of the emails he received, which eventually spread like a wildfire and infected all the computers in the network.
Now, all those connected systems were locked and are asking payment of 65 Bitcoin for access. The hackers, just like everyone, has demanded the ransom to be paid in Bitcoin as it’s an untraceable value flowing in a decentralized world. In today’s value, Bitcoin has crossed $9000 and is racing to reach $9300 very soon. Those prices boil down the ransom’s value to be around $600,000!
Though it’s unwilling, Florida tried recovering the affected systems, but it was billed to near one million, which is far better than what hacker has demanded.
And with no better options left, Florida’s shall be paying the 65BTC with no guarantee of recovering as said.
Many US cities like Georgia, Atlanta, Maryland, Baltimore, etc have experienced such ransomware in the past. Atlanta, at one point, had refused to pay the ransom to hackers and tried recovering. But that’s a way more expensive than it would actually cost. Many affected cities are rather readying to pay up the sum than ignoring it, as it would just cost them some hundreds of thousands of dollars than recovering whole in millions.
