Officials in Akron, Ohio are investigating and implementing ransomware removal against an attempt to take down several of the services in the city – including 311 – the hotline for public information! Other than this, service such as several municipal agencies and credit card payment services were affected.
“Suspicious Activity in the City’s Network”
This ransomware attack that was detected on Jan 22nd was detected when the IT office in the city of Akron had become aware of some suspicious activities in the network. This is also when the IT office had alerted the police and had begun implementing ransomware removal strategies – such as switching systems offline.
Services That Are Now Looking for Ransomware Removal
The IT department of the city is now providing ransomware removal services to a large range of city services. This includes the municipal courthouse, taxation departments, building departments, recreation departments and even the credit card payment services. All of these services were naturally halted with immediate effect and the municipal courthouse was also seen using the traditional audio recording devices as it did years ago.
Investigation Proceedings
The city yet has to specify what form of ransom has been demanded by the perpetrators, but because investigations are underway, officials are keeping silent. Even the strain of the ransomware is being kept from being made public!
An official spokeswoman of Akron, Ellen Lander Nischt, had released a statement saying that the threat was definitely not a variant of the notorious SamSam ransomware family. What is being made clear, however, is that Akron’s officials are very curious in finding out how the threat made it into their systems in the first place. This is why the IT agency of the city has pulled networks offline while they’re on the lookout for specific origin points of the problem.
“We Have No Idea Where Ground Zero Is”
While this incident is still not fixed and is ongoing Ellen Lander Nischt also added in the statement that the relevant agencies have no idea what ground zero was for the ransomware attack. The current intelligence of the city, however, has reassured citizens that they are very well-trained and equipped to take appropriate actions against the ransomware attack.
The city was keen on keeping all the updates of the attack to themselves, but their official statement included how they spent $9 million on technological upgrades in their IT infrastructure since 2016. Is it just us, or that doesn’t seem like a lot? Well, let’s see how things turn out for them.
