Florida City Council agreed this week to pay more than 600.000 dollars to the administrators of a ransomware to be able to retrieve data 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 webσελίδα of the city, the mail server, the billing system 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.
At first they did not plan to pay for them ransom but in recent weeks they realized that they were unable to recover the data that had been encrypted.
On Monday, therefore, they unanimously decided to pay 65 bitcoins (about 603.000 dollars) for a ransom.
Voting only lasted two minutes, according with the local Palm Beach Post.
Η Riviera Beach είναι ένα προάστιο βόρεια του Palm Beach της Florida. Πέρυσι, ένα άλλο προάστιο του Palm Beach - το Palm Springs - κατέβαλε επίσης λύτρα σε ένα ransomware, αλλά έχασε δεδομένα δύο χρόνων.
Ωστόσο, η Riviera City δεν είναι το θύμα που πλήρωσε τα περισσότερα λύτρα. Την "τιμή" αυτή κατέχει μια νοτιοκορεατική εταιρία φιλοξενίας ιστοσελίδων η Nayana, which paid 1,14 million dollars in bitcoins, after a ransomware attack in June of 2017.