Florence City in Alabama will pay a $300,000 ransom worth of Bitcoins after ransomware infection its computer system.
Florence City of Alabama has succumbed to the will of cyber attackers as they have unanimously agreed to pay the ransom asked by the threat actors. The ransomware deployed in their IT infrastructure was the DoppelPaymer ransomware.
Despite believing that the attackers stole no information; the City has agreed to go ahead with payments to avoid the leak of data online.
The character of DoppelPaymer encouraged the decision of the city; as the hackers are known to keep their word and not leak victim’s stolen data after payment.
The Mayor of Florence City, Alabama, said; “it appears they may have been in our system since early May — over a month going through our system. We have to approach it from the standpoint that we’re going to have to assume—we know they have some of our information; we don’t know that they have our critical information, frankly don’t think they do but we don’t know.”
The initial discovery of vulnerability was in May when KrebsOnSecurity brought the findings city officials’ notice. Less than one month later, the ransomware deployment was complete. However, the attackers started seeking the sum of $300,000 in bitcoin as ransom.
A post released by KrebsOnSecurity read, “on May 26, acting on a tip from Milwaukee, Wisc.-based cybersecurity firm Hold Security; KrebsOnSecurity contacted the office of Florence’s mayor to alert them that a ransomware gang had commandeered a Windows 10 system in their IT environment. Comparing the information shared by Hold Security dark web specialist, Yuliana Bellini; with the employee directory on the Florence website indicated the username for the computer that attackers had used to gain a foothold in the network on May 6 belonged to the city’s manager of information systems.”
