US city rejects $5.3M ransom demand and restores encrypted files from backup

Re:US city rejects $5.3M ransom demand and restores encrypte... by SOLAR_FIELDS on Thursday September 05, 2019 @11:17PM (#20892740)

I used to work for a city and had the demand been something reasonable to the size of the city (tens of thousands of dollars) they may have just paid it. The city I worked for had pretty good backups in place but still might have even done it to not lose a few days worth of work. FWIW the city I worked for was a suburban city with a population of about 80k

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Re:US city rejects $5.3M ransom demand and restores encrypte... by VectorLock on Friday September 06, 2019 @06:02AM (#20894370)

The city was ready to pay $400k. Or their insurance was, at least. Insurance was looking at it from the coldest perspective possible-- how much would it cost us to fix this otherwise?

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Re:US city rejects $5.3M ransom demand and restores encrypte... by msmerberry on Friday September 06, 2019 @01:54PM (#20897961)

Yup that's what I came here to say. It might have been easier to take a higher insurance premium and let it pay the ransom than to do a restore exercise. Either way, bravo.

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Re:US city rejects $5.3M ransom demand and restores encrypte... by VectorLock on Sunday September 08, 2019 @01:00PM (#20911702)

There is of course the terrible secondary effect of encouraging more ransomware but the insurance companies can simply sidestep this by saying "we don't cover that."

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