Source: zerohedge.com
On Thrusday city officials learned of the attack. They discovered unusual activity on the servers and city data had been encrypted without their knowledge. Later they received a ransom note with instructions on paying. The hackers were requesting 6 bitcoins.
The link where the bitcoin ransom is to be sent is a website hosted on the dark web. The city is assessing the extent of the attack and they are still contemplating on whether to pay. The FBI told victims of ransomware attacks in 2016 to refrain from paying because it doesn't guarantee that the data would be released and it emboldens the hackers to commit future attacks.
Currently the city is experiencing outages on various internal and customer applications. The app used by customers to pay bill and access court related information has been affected. The city's 911 service was also affected and the dispatchers now need to write the reports by hand because the report inputting application is down.
The city's Information Management team is working with support from Microsoft to track down the compromised files and hopefully correct the problem. They are also trying to discover if any of the customer's personal data was breached.
