City of Farmington recovers from SamSam Ransomware Attack!

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Farmington City, located in San Juan County in US State of New Mexico is said to have recovered from the SamSam Ransomware attack which struck on January 3rd,2018. However, according to the disclosure made by the US law enforcement FBI on Friday, the recovery is partial and is expected to take complete form by this month end.

Ongoing into the further details, the systems of the City of Farmington were locked down by ransomware malware just two days after the new year. When the people of the city tried to log in to the utility websites, they received a message saying that the files were encrypted and a ransom of 3 BTC was needed in exchange for Samsam decryptor.

Rob Mayes, the Farmington City Manager said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has advised not to pay the ransom to the hackers which accounted to 35,000 in USD. Instead, they said to go for data recovery from the current data continuity plan.

As per the press release issued by Rob Mayes, no info belonging to a customer, employee, and city related to the public administration system was compromised due to the incident. Also, the cyber attack did not breach any electric utility operations systems and the services related to public safety.

But as a precautionary measure, the IT staff of the public administration chose to shut down the services related to electronic bill pay and records processing. And the process of Samsam ransomware removal started on January 5th,2018.

FBI is said to be investigating the matter on a through a note and is trying to find any traces of the involvement of state-sponsored actors in this cyber incident related to SamSam Attack.

Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders have to notify a fact that hackers launched the same SamSam ransomware attack on Hancock Memorial Hospital early this month where the healthcare authorities chose to pay $55,000 in ransom instead of relying on backups for data recovery.

Note- SamSam Ransomware spreading hackers are often seen targeting unpatched server-side software running on hospital networks of West.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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