This year, the trend of targeting local municipalities with ransomware attacks is evidently on rise. Ransomware attacks on Colorado’s Department of Transportation and Atlanta’s Municipality system are worth mentioning because of the extent of their damage. Amid all those large-scale cryptovirological attacks, small town offices are not spared either.
One such attack took place on 13th April at the network of Rockport’s town office. Rockport is a small suburban town in the state of Maine. According to the town officials, the local municipal system sustained a serious ransomware attack, resulting into the encryption of critical data. It’s also important to note that no data was stolen in this cyber misdemeanor, which makes it a pure ransomware attack.
Town manager has applauded the IT team that scarified their long weekend in completing ransomware repair activities. The attackers demanded $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in ransom. Initially the authorities were willing to pay the attackers to restore ransomware files, however, their IT guys assured them that they could successfully do ransomware repair to recover all the encrypted data. The town office was also maintaining the data backups, which helped them perform without much hassle.
Except April 13th, the town’s IT teams have succeeded in recovering all the locked down data. Regarding investigating the attack and catching the culprits behind, the Town Manager has made it clear that the local police department is not equipped to investigate cyber crimes. The attack was carried out from the outside. Therefore, intradepartmental investigations were not called.
Takeaways From Rockport Ransomware Attack
The town’s officials should be commended on how they dealt with this cyber attack. Instead of yielding to the extortion demands of the criminals, they employed best IT specialists available to do ransomware repair works. When the ransomware repair works were in progress, they shut down the main server to prevent the cryptovirological virus from spreading to other town departments.
Moreover, they were practicing the maintenance of regular data backups, which eventually helped them in preventing a complete shutdown of the system.
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