Florida city gives in to hackers' $600,000 ransom
- 5 years ago
RIVIERA BEACH, FLORIDA — Some cyber criminals are getting one heck of a payday thanks to the desperate folks of Riviera Beach, Florida.
According to CBS12, a local government employee made the mistake of clicking on a malicious email link in early June that ended up paralyzing the entire city's computer systems.
The outage forced the police and fire departments to go analog and write down hundreds of daily 911 calls.
Fixing and insuring the computers will cost upwards of a million bucks, so in desperation, Riviera Beach commissioners voted to use the city's insurance to pay the ransom of 65 Bitcoins, which comes out to about $592,000.
Assuming the criminals don't double cross them, the city will regain access to data that was encrypted in the attack.
Even with their ransom-paying plans, Riviera Beach says they're still planning to investigate the attack. Yeah, a lot of good that does.
Either way, you can be sure hackers all over America are going to take this as encouragement to hack.
According to CBS12, a local government employee made the mistake of clicking on a malicious email link in early June that ended up paralyzing the entire city's computer systems.
The outage forced the police and fire departments to go analog and write down hundreds of daily 911 calls.
Fixing and insuring the computers will cost upwards of a million bucks, so in desperation, Riviera Beach commissioners voted to use the city's insurance to pay the ransom of 65 Bitcoins, which comes out to about $592,000.
Assuming the criminals don't double cross them, the city will regain access to data that was encrypted in the attack.
Even with their ransom-paying plans, Riviera Beach says they're still planning to investigate the attack. Yeah, a lot of good that does.
Either way, you can be sure hackers all over America are going to take this as encouragement to hack.