Baltimore City Computers Hacked — Again
Baltimore city government computers suffered outages on Tuesday after the city fell victim to a cyber attack. Early Tuesday morning, city computers were found riddled with RobbinHood, the same ransomware variant that took down the City of Greenville last month.
The exact intrusion method is unclear, however IT staff is working to identify how the cyber attack was able to bypass its security solution.
City officials have confirmed, emergency services were not impacted; although, a majority of city servers were shut down. This resulted in various departments being unable to access their files, including the city’s water department.
After RobbinHood infected the city’s servers, a ransom note populated on impacted devices. The note stated the current demands were 3 Bitcoins (approximately $17,600 USD) per system. Or, if the city wanted a discounted price, hackers would restore all of the city’s systems for 13 Bitcoins ($76,280 USD). The ransom note claimed demands would increase if the city didn’t pay within the first four days. Then, if the city failed to pay by the tenth day, the data would be permanently corrupted. According to the Baltimore Sun, city officials do not plan to pay the ransom demands.
This isn’t the first time ransomware corrupted Baltimore city’s networks. In March 2018 Baltimore’s emergency services were infected with ransomware. PC Matic has filed a public record request with the city to determine which security solution was being used at the time of infection and if they switched solutions since. However, these requests have yet to be responded to.
