If you're running a bunch of critical services you need to secure them, and that takes millions every year, it's unavoidable. A single hack that exposes this is irrelevant
I don't know how much of the money/time that will be spent (the "$18 million" figure is entirely imaginary) to instead try to recover their data/systems to functional... but I don't think it's a great use of money.
But indeed, actually running secure systems is what they got to be focusing on, and will be expensive. I think many organizations are going to find that they can't actually afford to do what's needed to reliably run the systems they already rely on, having not been running them reliably or securely.
I hope that the 'recovery' efforts, done in an emergency fashion, don't distract them from getting to that point and figuring out what they're going to do about it.
I'm not saying that Baltimore is handling the situation correctly but there would be costs well above the x hundred thousand dollars the ransomers would be asking for either way.
Some of the crypto-blackmailers use public bitcoin addresses, and they don't get as much money as you'd expect.
For the fact you'd probably have to move your life to Russia to escape the FBI, it doesn't pay very well.
No. $18 million was an estimate somebody gave once, who knows where it came from.
In fact, damages have not been repaired in Baltimore. 6 weeks later, most city services are still down. You can't pay a parking ticket or a water bill online. (You can send a check in; I am not sure where they record that you paid when they cash your check, and am not particularly confident they'll actually have a record I paid).
We in fact do not know how much money they've spent thus far, there have been no press briefings on this. Estimates of how much they will spend before it's over (will it ever be over?)... we all know how IT estimates work.
I think it will probably be quite a bit more than $18 million. And then there's estimating "damage to the economy." (There were two weeks when real estate transfers were frozen, because there was no way to check city liens. They can be done now, using a paper-based system that actually has those involved in the transaction sign an unusual contract agreeing to take on liability for unknown liens in unusual ways (I'm being vague cause I don't totally understand it), that some but not all title companies are willing to use).
The Baltimore ransomers only wanted ~$100K. If I were the mayor, yeah I'd pay it.
</Baltimore resident>