Extortionists received $ 500 K in BTC from the authorities in Florida

[KYCbench]

  

The authorities of the city of Lake City, Florida, paid $ 500,000 in Bitcoins to extortionists who infected the municipality's computer systems with an unnamed encryption virus. This is reported in the official press release.

The attack occurred on June 10, after one of the employees of the City Hall opened a letter containing a malicious file.

"Despite the fact that the IT specialists of the administration turned off all vulnerable systems within ten minutes after the attack was detected, the virus managed to hit almost all the computer systems of the city, with the exception of the police and fire protection systems that worked on a separate network," the press said. 

As a result of the coder’s attack, the work of the city’s administration was virtually paralyzed for the next two weeks.

The hackers behind the attack a week later contacted League of Cities, the city’s insurance provider, and demanded a ransom of 42 BTC (about $ 500,000 at the time) for unlocking urban systems.

At an emergency meeting of the City Council of Lake City, the authorities unanimously decided to pay the intruders. Payment was made on June 25th.

Currently, the city has received the key to decipher the affected systems, IT staff is working on data recovery.

Recall last week in a similar situation were the authorities of the city of Riviera Beach. They had to pay hackers 65 BTC ($ 600K).

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