Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hackers $600k

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by blotter_paper on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:59PM (#20229736)

>On Monday, Councilwoman KaShamba Miller-Anderson, the chairwoman of the board, asked Justin Williams, the interim information technology manager, for something seemingly simple. Could the elected officials’ new email addresses be posted online for the public to get in touch with them?

>Underscoring the enormity of the city’s troubles, Mr. Williams explained that the webmaster hoped to get to that soon.

>“He’s been working very feverishly to get that done,” Mr. Williams said.

...the webmaster is working feverishly to post a static piece of text to a website? I guess it really is hard to fire government workers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by bryanrasmussen on Thursday June 20, 2019 @04:33AM (#20230975)

Most City websites are going to be some sort of CMS and it might not be as simple as putting a text file in the public folder and linking to it.

Add to that all sorts of other things that might be getting in the way and you can have someone working feverishly to get it done.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by scarejunba on Thursday June 20, 2019 @01:04AM (#20230050)

It's the government. He probably needs to find long lost keys to SSH in, file four forms (each in triplicate), and receive approval from each person to get it out.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by jlgaddis on Thursday June 20, 2019 @03:19AM (#20230636)

It's municipal government. There almost certainly were no SSH keys.

The problem is that the credentials that the webmaster needs likely only exist in an Excel spreadsheet that was saved on the desktop of the "Administrator" user account on one of the machines that got hit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by crummy on Thursday June 20, 2019 @12:18AM (#20229826)

That's easy to say, but if the deployment server is down you might not be able to do it easily, and if you try to do it manually you need credentials which were stored on in a text file on another server that's down... etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Hit by Ransomware Attack, Florida City Agrees to Pay Hack... by dillonmckay on Thursday June 20, 2019 @06:34AM (#20231475)

He is the interim guy.

I wanna know what happened to the DNS records.

[ Parent | on HN ]