It must be those pesky Russians again


The City of Atlanta has been targeted in a ransomware attack that has impacted a number of its systems.

“The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information,” a spokesperson for the city explained, in a statement emailed to Fox News.

Atlanta’s Information Management team is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue, according to the city. “We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon,” it added. “Our City website, Atlantaga.gov, remains accessible and we will provide updates as we receive them.”

Citing a screenshot taken by a city employee, 11Alive reports that that hackers are demanding $51,000 in bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is popular with hackers because it is hard to trace.

The FBI is working with the city to determine what happened in the attack, according to 11Alive.

Last year, a major ransomware attack forced the shutdown of a host of IT systems at Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

Also in 2017, a hacker targeted Sacramento Regional Transit, deleting 30 million files in a ransomware attack. Officials worked to restore the data from backup files.

In 2016, a Los Angeles hospital paid a ransom of nearly $17,000 in bitcoins to hackers who infiltrated and disabled its computer network

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20...nsomware-attack.html

AAHAHAHAHAHA!
I guess the new banana republic leadership didn't upgrade the IT security.

any organization who gets hit now days by this just hasn't paid attention.

I hate to say it, but good. Everyday people get scammed by stuff like this all the time, but no one really has the resources or capability to do anything about it. If enough big cities get hit though we might actually see some action taken. I'm sure 51k isn't enough to make anyone want to do anything, but some of the past attacks have wanted millions.

Marta Karma

“The total paid by Florida municipalities over ransomware in the last two weeks now stands at $1.1m.

Officials in Lake City voted to pay hackers in Bitcoin after suffering downed computer systems for two weeks.

Coastal suburb Riviera Beach recently paid hackers $600,000 following a similar incident that locked municipal staff out of important files.

According to reports, IT staff in Lake City disconnected staff computers within minutes of the attack starting, but it was too late…”

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48770128

51 grand? That's it? For a whole city? Man go big or go home. Wussies.

Guess they didn't have PC Matic.

quote:

The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information

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CUSTOMER FACING? Who writes this crap? I guess they will now be improving their SECURITY POSTURE. This is worse than Ebonics.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:

quote:

The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CUSTOMER FACING? Who writes this crap? I guess they will now be improving their SECURITY POSTURE. This is worse than Ebonics.

Customer Facing is IT industry standard language - might want to avoid using it in a press release though... DOH!

I think customer facing is the proper nomenclature given that they are likely talking about the internet facing applications/services that the city residents use (making payments on taxes or utilities, etc).

Least it is standard terminology within IT consulting.

quote:

Least it is standard terminology within IT consulting.

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OK I believe you. It is too bad the city of Atlanta does not have someone to write press releases. It is the reason they have English and Commmunication Majors.

Riviera Beach Florida shelled out $660k it was reported 3 days ago on Rush

quote:

“We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon,” it added.

Would that be the same group of "professionals" who allowed the vulnerabilities that made this cluster possible?

And yes, "client or customer facing" is the correct terminology for these types of applications.

quote:

Originally posted by downtownv:
Riviera Beach Florida shelled out $660k it was reported 3 days ago on Rush

Uh, yes. See my June 26, 2019 10:20 AM post, several posts above, that resurrected this thread.

quote:

Originally posted by CQB60:
Marta Karma

MARTA is a horrible transit system that's the laughingstock of the industry. Ironically, a cyberattack might actually make its buses and light rail more on-schedule.

I had an old Windows server that I hadn't had running in about 4 years that I fired up a few months back.

Within about 4 days it was compromised and files encrypted.

City of Baltimore sites for paying bills online (water, property tax, speed cameras, etc) have been down since May 7th because of ransomeware. I think we’ll see a lot more of this.

quote:

Originally posted by buddy357:
City of Baltimore sites for paying bills online (water, property tax, speed cameras, etc) have been down since May 7th because of ransomeware. I think we’ll see a lot more of this.

I can imagine the insanity...writing a check using an envelope and a stamp...OH the humanity! Millennials will be having a full meltdown since they can't use their phone to pay a bill.

We call the fine mayor of Atlanta, (Keisha Lance-Bottoms) Rock Bottoms.