Florida Riviera Beach City Council agreed this week to pay more than $ 600.000 to ransomware administrators to help them recover data which were encrypted three weeks ago.
The city council decision, like Reported the CBS News, emerged when the officials concluded that there was no other way to retrieve the city's archives.
We should mention that the city also paid 941.000 dollars for new computers.
Access to Riviera City data did not exist from 29 May of 2019 when an employee of the Riviera Beach municipal police opened an e-mail message containing ransomware. Of course it malware it infected the city's network.
Ransomware locked the archives to all the city's services. Everything ceased to work, except 911's services, which continued to work but limited.
The city website, the mail server, the system versionaccounts and everything else stopped working, and communications were only by phone.
City officials held a first meeting on June 3 when they decided to spend 941.000 dollars on 310 new desktop computers and 90 laptops to enable the city to have a proper infrastructure after the incident.
Initially, they did not plan to pay the ransom, but in the last few weeks they realized that they were unable to retrieve the encrypted data.
So on Monday they unanimously decided to pay 65 bitcoins (approximately $ 603.000) for ransom.
The vote lasted only two minutes, according with the local Palm Beach Post.
Riviera Beach is a suburb north of Palm Beach, Florida. Last year, another Palm Beach suburb - Palm Springs - also ransomed ransomware, but lost two years of data.
However, Riviera City is not the victim who paid the most ransom. This "price" is owned by a South Korean web hosting company Nayana, which paid 1,14 million dollars in bitcoins, after a attack ransomware in June 2017.
