News is out that Albany County of New York was hit by a second cyberattack in just three weeks of January 2020. However, officials are confident that they will recover from this attack as soon as possible and will put an end to all their cyber sufferings by this month’s end.
Earlier this month the Albany County Airport Authority was in the news for becoming a victim of a ransomware attack on the Christmas day of last year. As the IT staff of the airport were helpless, they paid a 5 figure ransom to the hackers in Bitcoin to free up their data from the file-encrypting malware.
Phillip Calderone, the CEO of Albany Airport latest released a press statement that the hackers infiltrated its network through a third party company named LogicalNet, which was supposed to look into the Cybersecurity services of the airport. As it failed to render its services on an efficient note, Phillip clarified that the airport authorities were seeking a recovery of $25,000 deductible to be paid to the insurance provider as the next premium.
Now, Albany County is back in news for the reason of a similar sort. Reports are in that the Albany County Town of Colonie was hit by a Cyberattack on January 15th of this year and turned the town’s computer system and email systems offline.
Sara West, the spokesperson of the town confirmed the news and stated that the backup data will be used for data continuity purposes and stated that only a small portion of services was disrupted by the incident.
However, the communication system is reported to have been hit severely and so the county has chosen to practice old communication methods till the situation comes under complete control.
No critical information was compromised in the incident and all precautions to prevent such incidents taking place in the future were being taken.
Note- In March 2019, the City of Albany was hit by a ransomware attack after which Mayor Kathy Sheehan and other officials decided to spend $300,000 on new hardware and software including servers, firewalls, and threat monitoring solutions. As the county had resorted to back up data for critical applications, at that time they decided to pay no ransom to hackers.
Meanwhile, in another news related to a malware incident, officials from Tillamook County located in the US State of Oregon report that their websites and phone lines were disrupted by a cyber incident from the afternoon of Thursday. However, the officials are yet to confirm the details related to the kind of cyber attack. Only the 911 dispatch center and the emergency services are working fine as of now as the services run through a different server. The rest of the services including those related to the Sheriff’s office and the Justice court are reported to be down. So, the dockets related to the Justice Court are being processed on a manual note.
