{"id":95956,"date":"2019-09-08T17:22:22","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T00:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/u-s-city-beats-greedy-cyberattackers-saves-5-3m-ransomware-payment"},"modified":"2019-09-08T17:22:22","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T00:22:22","slug":"u-s-city-beats-greedy-cyberattackers-saves-5-3m-ransomware-payment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/u-s-city-beats-greedy-cyberattackers-saves-5-3m-ransomware-payment","title":{"rendered":"U.S. City Beats Greedy Cyberattackers, Saves $5.3m Ransomware Payment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/u-s-city-beats-greedy-cyberattackers-saves-5-3m-ransomware-payment.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After what has been a summer of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/08\/22\/us\/ransomware-attacks-hacking.html\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\">crippling ransomware attacks<\/a>,\u201d there has now been some respite courtesy of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which has proven that the playing field can be levelled. The city was hit back in July, with its data held hostage, ransomed for more than $5 million in bitcoin. But as the attackers waited for their payment, the city\u2019s law enforcement agencies and technology teams had other ideas.<\/p>\n<p>No types of organisations are immune from these types of attacks these days,\u201d Mayor Jon Mitchell <a href=\"https:\/\/www.southcoasttoday.com\/news\/20190904\/update-ransomware-attacker-demanded-53-million-from-city-of-new-bedford\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\">told<\/a> reporters. The city government, he said, had been taking steps to strengthen our defences\u2014but any network is only one keyword click away from an attack. Thankfully, he acknowledged, \u201cthe attack could have been much worse.\u201d It hit on the July 4 holiday when many systems were shut down.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe attack was a variant of the RYUK virus,\u201d Mitchell confirmed. \u201cThe victim needs to make a ransom payment to acquire the decryption key from the attacker.\u201d The attack did not affect all systems or disrupt all services, and on the return to work on July 5, the city kept systems turned off as they isolated the attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After what has been a summer of \u201ccrippling ransomware attacks,\u201d there has now been some respite courtesy of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which has proven that the playing field can be levelled. The city was hit back in July, with its data held hostage, ransomed for more than $5 million in bitcoin. But [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1318,1490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-bitcoin","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}