Florida city to hand over $600,000 to malware cyber crooks

A small city in Florida has agreed to hand over a whopping $600,000USD to criminals after their computer network was crippled by a ransomware infection.

Riviera Beach in Florida posted a notice from its website this month saying it had a “data security event” but wouldn’t go into any more detail. However since then, the full scale of the attack has emerged. According to reports, ransomware had ransacked their computer networks, preventing 9/11 dispatchers logging calls, emails from being sent and even meant city employees had to be paid via check instead of direct deposit.

All of this, and of course countless records and files were encrypted with the only way of getting them back meaning handing over money in the form of Bitcoin for that all important decryption key.

And how did the network get infected in the first place? Through one of the most common methods of attack. A city employee at the police department opened an infected email attachment from an unsolicited email.

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From a data security standpoint, this is frustrating news for two reasons. One, it shows that city employees have not been trained to follow basic data security habits; opening email attachments you’re not explicitly expecting has been Security 101 for years. Two, it demonstrates that the city wasn’t backing up their data effectively, otherwise there would be little reason to pay the ransom once they removed the infection.

Perhaps a third frustrating point is that the city plan on paying the ransom, meaning they’re only going to provide further motivation for such criminals to continue their attacks. And given their willingness to pay, they can expect to be the target of other ransomware-spreading cyber crooks in the future.

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When Riviera Beach officials to pay up – via their insurance policy – there is still no guarantee that the crooks will decrypt the files or simply take the money and run, or worse, ask for more money. That is, naturally, the risk of doing business with criminals.

If you want to protect yourself from ransomware, one of the most important steps is to tackle the methods in which it commonly infected computers or networks. Through email. Never open email attachments from emails unless you were explicitly expecting them from a certain person at a specific time. Social engineering techniques can make it very easy for unsuspecting recipients to open attachments. And of course remember to have current back-ups of all your files at all times so if you ever do lose your files, you can always retrieve them.

It also (almost) goes without saying to have Internet security software installed on all your devices as well.

Whether Riviera Beach will get their lost files back remains to be seen, but we hope they’ve learned their lesson from the events of the last few weeks and other cities take what happened on board for the future.