Officials at the Atlanta City have confirmed that their public network was reigning under the influence of a ransomware attack encrypting all the critical data pertaining to the city. The Atlanta City Chief Operating Officer Richard Cox has confirmed the news and said that the hackers were demanding a sum of $50,000 worth of Bitcoins to decrypt the locked files.
Note 1- Ransomware is nothing but a malware which encrypts a database until a ransom is paid to ransomware authors or spreaders which is usually in the form of Cryptocurrency.
Mr. Richard Cox confirmed that the local police along with the FBI are investigating on more details about the ransomware variant which hit the servers and who could be behind the attack i.e. an individual hacking group or a state-sponsored hacking team.
City officials said that they were informed about the attack at 5:40 am on Thursday and suspect that the ransomware might have crept into the database on late Wednesday.
The IT staff of the Atlanta city is working in association with several vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco to restore the lost data as quickly as possible. Officials say that almost all the servers of the city of Atlanta are having a backup which could be recovered by early next week.
Meanwhile, Atlanta City Mayor Kesha Lance Bottoms confirmed that there is a bit of inconvenience to those paying online bills and accessing court records due to the ransomware attack. But the 48-year old American Politician turned lawyer said that entire network will be brought back to normalcy by this month end.
Note 2- Meanwhile, MARTA aka Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority has issued a public statement on late Thursday that few of its services will be down for the next few days due to the ransomware attack. But assured that network normalcy will be brought back by the end of this month.
