On May 7th this year the city of Baltimore witnessed a ransomware attack on its servers as a result of which tax payment services, land dealings, and many other civic utility services were disrupted since then.
A detailed inquiry made by the officials on May 8th this year revealed that the servers were attacked by Robbinhood ransomware which encrypts hard drives and prevents users from accessing the data.
Now the news is out that the cost of the ransomware attack could reach the mark of $18 million or even more. As the officials have decided not to pay the ransom demanded by the hackers which are supposed to be 13 Bitcoins or $75,000 the estimate could cost furthermore.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that the attack has affected digital services of factories producing vaccines, airports, and ATMs along with hospitals. Essential services like fire, EMTs, and police remained partially affected as most of the digital work is being conducted on a manual note.
A web resource named Ars Technica reveals that the cost of IT recovery from the malware attack will cost $10 million in addition to the loss of $8 million which was incurred due to systems downtime. Till date over $1 million was spent on the replacement of certain critical hardware components and a third-party company has been hired to do the malware cleanup from the systems.
Sheryl Goldstein, the Mayor of Baltimore has said that the city’s digital assets will be recovered soon and insisted that the IT staff have decided not to bow down to hackers.
FBI has been informed about the incident and insists that there is only 50-50 chance of recovering the data via backups as the deployed disaster recovery plan was not up to the mark.
