The North Miami Beach Police Department was hit with a ransomware cyber attack and has been told that it must pay millions of dollars to regain access to critical information that has now been locked down.
The Riviera Beach attack began on May 29 after a police department employee opened an infected email attachment.
In the June 20 Webinar, Derrington will discuss the challenge of storing video data, finding a fluid storage solution that can accommodate increasing amounts of video, and the security of stored data.
A decade ago cryptocurrencies were nothing more than curiosities for computer geeks. Now they are going legitimate, but despite all of the moves toward legitimacy, cryptocurrencies remain the favored money for criminal activity online.
More than 140 separate applications were totally or partially disabled by the attack, said Daphne Rackley who heads Atlanta's IT department. About 30% of the affected programs were "mission critical" as they were used by either the police or its courts.
In Atlanta, hackers demanded $51,000 in the cryptocurrency bitcoin. City officials declined to say whether they made the payments. Baltimore officials didn’t release details on the ransom amount.
Because of a ransomware attack, the Atlanta Municipal Court has been unable to validate warrants. Police officers have been writing reports by hand. The city has stopped taking employment applications.
Hackers infected 70 percent of storage devices that record data from D.C. police surveillance cameras eight days before President Trump’s inauguration, forcing major citywide reinstallation efforts, according to the police and the city’s technology office.
Klatt stressed that no data was stolen and it all remained on the system. But the encryption meant no one could use it unless the ransom was paid. The hackers demanded three "bitcoin," the value of which that day was about $2,440.
In just the first quarter of this year ransomware attacks extorted more than $200 million from victims, including individuals, businesses, hospitals, government offices, and law enforcement.