Should governments pay extortion payments after a ransomware attack?
Summary: Cisco Talos and Cisco Security experts weighed in on whether city governments should pay ransomware ransoms, citing Baltimore's May attack that shut systems for weeks and was expected to cost more than $10 million to recover, versus Lake City and Riviera Beach in Florida, which paid attackers a combined $1 million in Bitcoin. The piece also notes Atlanta spent roughly $17 million to recover from a ransomware attack whose attackers had initially requested $52,000.
Key Takeaway: The cost gap cuts both ways: Atlanta's recovery ran about 327 times the original $52,000 demand, while the two Florida cities paid $1 million and still faced work decrypting their data, and Talos experts warn payment funds attackers and carries no guarantee of file recovery or removal of a backdoor.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- Malware
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