City of Baltimore Security Incident

Sep 03, 2019 Baltimore Ransomware Attack Recovery Update Cyber Attack | Cybersecurity | Ransomware | Cyber Insurance | Data Recovery Kerri Taylor Head of Web & App Marketing, Ziff Davis UPDATE: September 3, 2019 City Officials Transfer Funds, Consider Cyber Insurance It appears that the recovery effort from the original Baltimore ransomware attack is still ongoing. The Baltimore Sun reported on Saturday that city officials agreed to transfer $6 million from a fund for parks and public facilities to help cover what was described as remediation and hardening costs. Additionally, Baltimore officials said last month that they are considering the purchase of cyber insurance . The proposed policy would cost $830,000 and provide $20 million in liability coverage. Original Story A while back we reported on the City of Baltimore being hit by a ransomware strain named RobbinHood . This malware effectively shut down the majority of the municipal governments servers and some government applications. This included, but was not limited to employee email systems, phone lines, and online billing systems used by the city. While they originally planned to recover quickly from this disaster that has most certainly not been the case. The recovery from this attack is now dragging on into its sixth week. According the local CBS affiliate in Baltimore , the citys government is inching along at a snails pace towards full functionality with expectations of remediation by the end of last week. As of June 12 th , only 70% of employee email accounts are active once again and many billing systems are still in a spiral. Baltimore Deputy Chief of Staff Sheryl Goldstein said that, I do not expect June bills to go out. Goldstein elaborated further by notifying Baltimore residents that they should not expect a water bill for the month of June. Instead they should anticipate a backlog of charges that will show up in the mail eventually. While attempts to restore normality have lagged, it appears...

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