Urban Bungle: Atlanta Cyber Attack Puts Other Cities on Notice
- Larry Greenemeier for Scientific American
- April 4, 2018
- Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/urban-bungle-atlanta-cyber-attack-puts-other-cities-on-notice/
[Atlanta] has spent the past two weeks restoring online services disrupted by ransomware that held encrypted data hostage. ... Those computer problems were part of a high-profile “ransomware” cyberattack on the City of Atlanta that has lasted nearly two weeks and has yet to be fully resolved. ... The criminals initially gave the city seven days to pay about $51,000 in the cryptocurrency bitcoin. ... That deadline came and went last week. “If the city had paid the ransom, I would have expected them to bring up systems more quickly than they have done,” says Justin Cappos, a professor of computer science and engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. “Assuming the city did not pay the ransom, their ability to recover their systems at all shows that they at least did a good job backing up their data.”
