The Victimized Riviera Beach Pays Ransom

The officials of Riviera Beach, Florida, held a meeting and voted to pay the ransom of 65 bitcoins ($603,000) to regain access to the local services that had been knocked down by the ransomware attack earlier in May 2019.

The ransomware attack paralyzed the operations of the Riviera Beach city services including website, billing system, email server, the 991 services operations were limited, and the water utility pump station. All the communications were done in person or over the phone, and utility payment could be done only by cash or check which made the routine operations really tough.

Though it wasn’t planned to pay a ransom, it became obvious that without backups that hadn’t been done properly it would be impossible to regain access to any city network and restore the data. There was a meeting held on Monday where the Riviera Beach city officials unanimously voted that the insurance carrier pay the demanded ransom, hoping to regain access to the network and all the encrypted data.  Besides, it was decided to spend more than $900,000 at new computer hardware. On June, 5 the IT staff restored the city website and published a notice informing about a data security event.

Numerous local governments have been attacked in the US recently – the City of Del Rio, Texas where routine operations were disabled by ransomware, the City of Atlanta, Georgia that fell a victim of SamSam ransomware, and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska that was attacked by BitPaymer ransomware. Ransomware Hunter rule pack keeps ward of your infrastructure providing detection and automatic alerting covering the full threat life-cycle:
https://my.socprime.com/en/integrations/ransomware-hunter-hpe-arcsight