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Complete Story
09/05/2019
Ransomware Attackers Demanded $5.3M from City of New Bedford
The State of Security
Digital criminals demanded $5.3 million in ransom from the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts following a ransomware attack.
Jon Mitchell, Mayor of New Bedford, explained in a press briefing that the ransom demand came shortly after the City’s Management Information Systems (MIS) staff detected a ransomware attack in the early morning hours of 5 July 2019. The MIS staff disrupted the attack by disconnecting the City’s servers and shutting down its computer systems. That was after the ransomware had succeeded in affecting 158 workstations–approximately four percent of the municipality’s computers.
Initially, Mitchell opposed negotiating with those responsible for the attack, but per Providence Journal, he eventually agreed to hear out their demands. The digital attackers said they’d provide New Bedford with the decryption key in exchange for $5.3 million. The City countered with $400,000, which it had acquired from insurance proceeds, but the bad actors rejected that offer and made no counter offer. It’s then that Mitchell and the MIS team decided to recover the municipality’s data on their own by rebuilding its server network, restoring most software apps and replacing all affected computer workstations.
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