This article originally appeared in SC Magazine on January 14, 2019.
Another city was hit with a ransomware attack which knocked daily services back into the era of the pen and Pad.
Last week, the city of Del Rio, Texas was hit with a ransomware attack which forced city officials to shut down the servers at its city hall and deny employees access to the system, according to a Jan. 10 press release.
As a result city officials were forced to conduct transactions manually using paper, similar to when a CryptoLocker attack shut down the operations in the Borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) and City of Valdez in Alaska.
Officials a have reported the attack to law enforcement.
“The growing number of exploit kits and malware at their disposal is emboldening malicious actors to attack organizations with a rich trove of consumer data,” Mike Bittner, digital security & operations manager at The Media Trust told SC Media.
“Government organizations, in particular city governments, are prime targets; they not only process a lot of citizen and business data, but are also less secure as tighter budgets severely limit what IT updates they can carry out.”
He added the threat actors have no doubt put the 89,000 local governments across the country in their cross-hairs and that It is just a matter of time before many of these governments realize they’ve been hacked.
